Adopted in 2022, the Digital Services Act is now frequently invoked by the European Commission to question new technology giants about their compliance with obligations. Latest: Linkedin, which this week received a first preliminary questionnaire concerning its use of profiling to display targeted advertisements. This first stage of investigation follows a complaint filed at the end of February by the organization EDRi (European Digital Rights) and other associations.
LinkedIn was designated in April 2023 as a “very large online platform”, a status provided by the DSA for online platforms or services meeting several criteria defined in the text and which subjects them to a whole series of special obligations. LinkedIn now has until April 5 to respond to the Commission’s questions, which will subsequently decide whether or not to open a more in-depth investigation into the social network and its compliance with the DSA.
The investigations are getting tougher
This second stage is also the one which opens for the AliExpress site: in November 2023, the Commission announced that it had opened a request for information on the online marketplace. It announced yesterday the opening of a formal investigation into potential violations of the obligations to which AliExpress is subject under the DSA.
The investigators are thus seeking to determine, among other things, whether AliExpress does not authorize the sale on its platform of illicit products such as counterfeit pharmaceutical products, but also whether the platform actually offers its users a means of recommending products that is not not targeted based on their profile or report illegal content. In total, the Commission is investigating possible violations of around ten articles of the DSA on the part of AliExpress.
At the same time, the Commission also announced that it had sent questions to 6 platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube and generative artificial intelligence and the way in which companies intend to moderate the risks linked to these new technologies.
A slew of investigations
As early as November 2023, the Commission had initiated several requests for information of this type, not all of which resulted in formal investigations. In addition to LinkedIn and AliExpress, Amazon, for example, had to answer several questions from the Commission in November 2023, again relating to the provision of illicit products on its marketplace and its recommendation system.
This same month of November 2023, the Commission questioned TikTok and YouTube on subjects related to the protection of minors accessing their platforms. This preliminary investigation culminated in February 2024 with the opening of a formal investigation specifically targeting TikTok.
By the end of 2023, Apple, Google, X (Twitter), Meta and TikTok had all received several requests for information from the European Commission regarding their compliance with DSA obligations. These investigations led to the opening of a formal investigation targeting X (Twitter) in December.
Two areas, the same philosophy
The DSA has been applicable to very large platforms since August 2023, and its application has been extended to all online platforms since February 2024. Unlike the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which is mainly concerned To ensure healthy and undistorted competition between digital market players, the DSA mainly aims to fight against the dissemination and marketing of illicit content. The two texts therefore have different fields of application, but a fairly similar mechanism for designating the companies concerned.
The two texts thus define a series of lighter obligations applying to all platforms, but provide additional obligations targeting “very large platforms” within the framework of the DSA or “access controllers” within the framework of the DMA, companies designated by the Commission based on criteria of size and weight on the market.
In the case of the DSA, the Commission had thus designated in April 2023 19 players meeting the criteria of Very large online platform or very large search engines, to which were added Pornhub, Xvideos and Stripchat in December 2023.