February 2024 ∙ Julian Jaursch - The Digital Services Act is in effect –

Now, with the breadth of services covered by the DSA and the various procedural rules applied to them, the remit for the new regulators is quite broad. [...] Moreover, contrary to many other laws, the DSA directly calls for DSCs to collaborate not only with other regulatory agencies but also with academia and civil society, another unique feature of this new type of regulator.1 This paper takes these new regulatory bodies, the DSCs, as a point of departure to provide an overview of the changes to come with the implementation of the DSA, over both the s. [...] Instead of being too lax or censoring, the bigger danger is that the DSA will come to stand for piles and piles of data in the form of transparency reports, audits and repositories, which regulators and researchers are too overwhelmed to grapple with because of cumbersome bureaucracy and a lack of resources. [...] The more DSCs acknowledge and welcome the diversity of their tasks (coordinating and enforcing), the diversity of the platforms they oversee (smaller and bigger ones; for-profit and not-for-profit ones; from marketplaces to search engines to social media) and the diversity of the groups they need to engage with (users, researchers, civil society and other regulators), the better their understandin. [...] The same goes for the big future task of evaluating the DSA: Instead of treating it as a chore, the DSCs and the Commission could view the upcoming first review in 2027 as a learning experience, avoiding an evaluation theater that does not support enforcement and reform efforts.