Cross-jurisdictional overview on the national implementation of the Digital Services Act

What is the DSA?

The Digital Services Act harmonizes the rules applicable to intermediary services with the objective of ensuring a safe, predictable and trusted online environment, and aims to address the societal risks involved in disseminating illegal content, disinformation or other content online.

With the DSA, the European Commission wants intermediary services such as online platforms to take more responsibility for the role they play in disseminating harmful (user) content, by implementing certain measures, e.g. on content moderation, becoming more transparent and by cooperating with authorities. This is done by building on the (2000) e-Commerce Directive that (among other things) stipulates under which conditions hosting services are not liable for illegal information stored (the so-called "safe harbor" provision) and by introducing a new and extensive set of far-reaching obligations for online platforms.

Legislative process of the DSA

The DSA was proposed on 15 December 2020. An agreement was reached on 22 April 2022 and subsequently adopted by the European Parliament on 5 July 2022. The European Council gave its final approval on 4 October 2022 and the DSA was published in the Official Journal on 19 October 2022.

The DSA became applicable to very large online platforms and very large online search engines (who were designated as such by the European Commission beforehand) on 25 August 2023 and becomes applicable in its entirety from 17 February 2024.
 

This overview follows the national implementation of the DSA across nine EU jurisdictions, taking a look into local legislative developments, upcoming DSA developments, and responses from national authorities and case law.