The EU Designates 17 Sites As ‘Very Large Online Platforms’ Subject To DSA’s Most Stringent Rules
I’ve been criticizing the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) approach to internet regulations, because they’re doing this “wink, wink, nudge, nudge” bit in which they insist that the DSA is not regulating speech, but then they admit that the point of the DSA is to see less “bad” speech on the internet.
But, whether we like it or not, it’s here. And it’s going to have a pretty big impact. Part of the law is that, while it does impact online services of all sizes, there are some categories, based on size, that will lead to more stringent rules, with the most notable one being the “Very Large Online Platforms” or VLOPs. As one friend of mine has noted, it feels kinda like the “Rodents of Unusual Size” or ROUS’s from The Princess Bride.
Even though the DSA went into effect last year, there were still a bunch of things to clarify before it meant anything, and that included who would qualify as a VLOP. There had been some discussion about whether or not Twitter would even qualify (to which one policy person told me that the EU would rewrite the rules until Twitter absolutely qualified, because they were clearly targeting the company).
A bunch of platforms were required to hand over a bunch of info to the EU to make their final determination, and now the EU has declared 17 platforms from 13 different companies to be VLOPs, and yes, Twitter made the cut:
Very Large Online Platforms:
- Alibaba AliExpress
- Amazon Store
- Apple AppStore
- Booking.com
- Google Play
- Google Maps
- Google Shopping
- Snapchat
- TikTok
- Wikipedia
- YouTube
- Zalando
I don’t think there are really any surprises here, though people outside of the EU may be less familiar with Zalando, a successful online retailer platform in the EU. Potentially Booking.com is a bit surprising? And, personally, I can’t think of anyone who uses Google Shopping, but I guess a bunch of people do.
The very different platforms on the list also make me wonder how some of these platforms are going to deal with the various rules. Google Maps’ content moderation decisions seem… to be in a different category from Wikipedia’s, which would be very, very different from a mobile app store.
Anyway, now that Twitter is on the list, we’ll have to see if Elon still is happy that he vocally endorsed the DSA approach for Twitter a year ago. We noted, at the time, that he’d likely come to regret this, as it seemed to go against a variety of the things he claimed to stand for. Of course, now that he may start to face regulatory burdens from the DSA (and they can be very burdensome), it will not be surprising to see him change his tune on the EU.
The other one that will be interesting to see is Wikipedia. As noted above, there are pretty big differences in many of these platforms, but Wikiepedia’s moderation model is not just different in style, it’s just entirely different as so much of it is done by volunteer editors. It seems like it’s going to be a compliance challenge for Wikipedia to have to set up an appeals board for some of its content choices, as the DSA will require.
The EU also designated Google and Bing as “Very Large Online Search Engines” which also now have some specific rules, but no on else made the cut. That’s not too surprising.
I still fear the way this is going to play out, though we’ll see in the long run. As our recent research indicated, other internet regulations have served to stifle speech and competition, and give more control to the “very large” online providers who have the ability to deal with the compliance costs. One hopes that the end result of the DSA is not the same, but it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s how it ended up.