The EU’s Digital Services Act: user protection, or the thin end of the censorship wedge?
In the early hours of Saturday morning, negotiators from the European Parliament, the 27 member states and the European Commission reached agreement on the Digital Services Act (DSA) that will still have to be reviewed at a technical and linguistic level before its final approval by the Commission and the Parliament, which is practically guaranteed, and that is expected to come into force in early 2024.
Along with the Digital Markets Act (DMA), this is the kind of legislation that makes the big tech companies very nervous, and which has led them to ramp up their lobbying budgets to try to weaken many of its provisions.
What are the big tech companies so worried about? The basic idea of the law is to make everything that is illegal offline illegal online, with significant fines that could reach 6% of their global turnover. This get-tough approach pulls the pendulum away from a position that allowed technology platforms to argue that they were too big to be regulated, or as EU internal market commissioner Thierry Breton puts it,
“The time of big online platforms behaving like they are ‘too big to care’ is coming to an end.”
