Focus on European Commission’s proposal for a Digital Services Act
- Articles and memoranda
- Posted 31.03.2021
On 15 December 2020, the European Commission published the Digital Services Act Package, which includes two significant proposals:
- a proposal for a Regulation on a Single Market For Digital Services (Digital Services Act or “DSA”) and amending Directive 2000/31/EC (“e-Commerce Directive”),
- a proposal for a Regulation on contestable and fair markets in the digital sector (Digital Markets Act or "DMA").
These proposals are expected to affect various types of providers of digital services (such as marketplaces, social media platforms, content-sharing platforms) in the European Union (“EU”) and to create a safer and more open digital space while further developing the European Single Market for digital services.
The proposal for a Digital Services Act (“DSA Proposal”) clarifies and upgrades the responsibilities and the accountability of the digital service providers with respect to any illegal content they intermediate or disseminate without wiping out past principles. The DSA Proposal sets out several layers of obligations, which shall apply to the digital service providers depending on the type of services they provide in the digital space.
For more information with respect to the DSA Proposal (context, entities targeted, key obligations, supervisory framework, sanctions), please read our article here.
As for the DMA, it will impose obligations for large online platforms (e.g. online search engines, video-sharing platform services, cloud computing services) that behave as “gatekeepers”, such status being more fully defined in the DMA. The DMA aims to refrain from anti-competitive and unfair practices and ensure that gatekeepers themselves act in a way that guarantees an open online environment.