Articles for category: and Global Implications

Will the DSA work?

The DSA has many components but, in its essence, it is a digital due process regulation bundled with risk-management tools. But will these tools work? My main concern about the DSA resides also in its strength – it relies on societal structures that the law can only foresee and incentivize but cannot build; only people can. These structures, such as local organisations analysing threats, consumer groups helping content creators, and communities of researchers, are the only ones to give life to the DSA’s tools.

9. November 2022

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Why the DSA could save us from the rise of authoritarian regimes

The rise of extremist right-wing governments, as observed recently in Italy, is closely linked to the business models of large digital platforms such as Facebook and YouTube. Their algorithms polarise debates and stir up emotions because that enables them to keep people on their screens for longer and show them advertising. The European Union’s Digital Services Act is the framework to address this dangerous development.

8. November 2022

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The DSA fails to reign in the most harmful digital platform businesses – but it is still useful

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While the DSA has just been crafted carefully enough to avoid major damage to digital rights in the EU, it has focussed so much on who must delete what kind of content within which time frame, that it missed the bigger picture: no content moderation policy in the world will protect us from harmful online content as long as we do not address the dominant, yet incredibly damaging surveillance business model of most large tech firms.

8. November 2022

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The EU’s new Digital Services Act and the Rest of the World

The European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) is a major milestone in the history of platform regulation. Other governments are now asking themselves what the DSA’s passage means for them. The DSA is a far better law than most that have been proposed in other parts of the world. I have encouraged U.S. lawmakers to emulate it in many respects. But lawmakers around the world should view it as a starting point, rather than an end point, in considering potential regulations in their own countries. T

7. November 2022

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Regulating influence, timidly

The DSA considers advertising and recommender systems as deserving of regulatory attention, and not immutable facets of an online world. But even as the regulation furthers current standards in disclosures around online advertising, it insulates advertising business models and consolidates platform efforts to sidestep the operative question that characterizes online advertising: how and why advertisements reach who they reach, in less abstract terms.

4. November 2022

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Now What

The question of the DSA's enforcement has already been getting considerable attention, with one of the main concerns being that the resources put forth by the European Commission are too humble when compared to the DSA’s far-reaching goals. More concerningly, the DSA leaves loopholes and grey areas in respect to native advertising and the influencer economy.

4. November 2022

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Remedying Overremoval

The DSA provides a whole set of notice and action mechanisms to address online harms. The codified mechanisms, together with detailed procedures, are foreseen for content that is illegal but also for content incompatible with platforms’ terms and conditions. But the DSA has also another goal, to ensure that the new rules respect fundamental human rights. While definitely a good step towards more effective protection of users’ rights, the true effect of the provided remedies will depend on their practical implementation. Some elements of the new regime may be a bold experiment the result of which is not fully predictable.

3. November 2022

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Contextualisation over Replication

The EU is notorious for using regulatory solutions like the DSA to dominate and pre-empt global digital standards. Often, the major conversations on the international impacts of EU laws have oscillated between capture and actually providing normative leadership on thorny aspects of digital regulation. African countries should develop their own content regulation rules by paying more attention to their contexts and consider aspects of the DSA only where they will improve such local rules.

3. November 2022

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The DSA as a paradigm shift for online intermediaries’ due diligence

The DSA adopts a meta-regulatory approach. While the shift to a meta-regulatory model should be welcomed for enabling reflexive and adaptive regulation, we must also be weary of its risk of collapsing in the absence of well-resourced and independent institutions. Indeed, this risk affects the extent to which the exportation of the DSA outside Europe would be in the public interest.

2. November 2022

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