DSA tracker #9
Developments in enforcing the Digital Services Act
There are more and more developments regarding the implementation and enforcement of the DSA and more resources are available regarding the application of thes Regulation. In this newsletter, I summarize the most important events and news related to the application of the DSA.
Regulatory & enforcement actions
The European Commission issued a fine of €200 million to Temu under the Digital Services Act.
What does this mean? “The evidence at the disposal of the Commission indicates that consumers in the EU are very likely to encounter illegal items on Temu.”
What is the background to this? “The company failed to diligently identify, analyse, and assess the systemic risks of illegal products being offered on its platform and the resulting harm to consumers in the European Union.”
“Temu’s risk assessment of 2024 falls short of the standards laid out in the DSA:
It is based on general information about risks concerning the eCommerce sector as a whole, rather than on specific evidence about Temu’s own service, including public reports and testing.
It seriously underestimated how often EU consumers are likely to encounter illegal items. Evidence from a mystery shopping exercise included in the Commission’s investigation shows that a very high percentage of the selected chargers failed basic safety tests, while a high percentage of tested baby toys posed safety risks of medium to high severity, as they contain chemicals exceeding legal safety limits or pose suffocation hazards due to detachable parts.
It did not properly assess how the design of its service - including recommender systems and product promotion programmes by affiliated influencers - could amplify dissemination risks of illegal products.”
What are the next steps? “Temu has until 28 August 2026 to submit an action plan to the Commission, as required by Article 75 of the DSA. The plan must set out measures to remedy the breach of its risk-assessment obligations. The European Board for Digital Services will have one month from receipt of the plan to issue its opinion. The Commission will then have a further month to adopt its final decision and set a reasonable period for implementation. Failure to comply with the non-compliance decision may lead to periodic penalty payments. The Commission continues to engage with Temu to ensure compliance with the decision and with the DSA more generally.”
The Special Panel on child safety online met for the third and final time on June 16.
What does this mean? “Discussions focused on lessons learned and good practices in the EU and in partner countries, as well as on crucial topics such as the empowerment of parents and guardians to ensure their children’s wellbeing online. This meeting builds upon insights from the two previous gatherings of the Special Panel on child safety online, which examined the risks and benefits of digital services for children and the EU regulatory framework for protecting minors online, respectively.”
What is the background to this? “On the occasion of the final panel, a new Eurobarometer survey confirms the significant impact of excessive screentime and social media on the mental and physical health of young people. On average, young people across Europe spend 4.5 hours online during a school day and 6.1 hours a day at weekends. Most strikingly, 14% of adolescents report spending more than 10 hours a day on screens.”
What are the next steps? “On 13 July, the Panel’s Co-chairs will present recommendations to President Ursula von der Leyen on how to further strengthen the EU’s trailblazing framework for the protection of minors online.”
In the context of the EU-Brazil Digital Partnership in Brasília, the Commission’ services responsible for enforcing the DSA signed an administrative arrangement focused on the protection of minors online with Brazil’s Agência Nacional de Proteção de Dados (ANPD).
What does this mean? “The arrangement strengthens cooperation on the protection of minors online between the Commission’ services and ANPD, with special attention paid to transparency obligations for digital platforms, risk assessment and mitigation measures, and technological cooperation on algorithms and artificial intelligence. The arrangement will facilitate information exchange, including technical expert dialogues. It will, for instance, enable both authorities to share best practices, conduct joint studies, and cooperate on research projects.”
What is the background to this? “The Commission services have signed similar administrative arrangements with the UK's Ofcom and Australia's eSafety Commissioner. The three regulators launched a trilateral cooperation group on age assurance. More recently, the Commission has signed an arrangement with Japan's Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications.”
What are the next steps? “The Commission remains committed to expanding global collaboration with leading national regulators to ensure a fair and safe digital future.”
G7 agreed on common principles for protecting minors online.
What does this mean? G7 Digital and Tech Ministers, are committed to affirming the following principles defining a safer and more secure digital space for minors:
Principle 1: Effective age assurance is key to ensure a safer, more secure, and age-appropriate experience for minors.
Principle 2: Protect minors from harms online through safety by design approaches such as protective and by default settings, including parental control tools, which prevent minors from being exposed to content, interactions and features that are not age appropriate, safe and secure.
Principle 3: The creation and distribution of child sexual abuse material and criminal activity related to non-consensual intimate imagery must be prevented, consistent with G7 members’ current applicable legal obligations.
Principle 4: Parents, guardians and carers should be equipped with easy-to-use, privacy-respecting, effective parental control tools that are interoperable when technically feasible to help guide and empower minors online.
Principle 5: Minors should be empowered with a comprehensive education focused on building the necessary literacy and skills in order to better understand digital systems, and critically engage with digital technologies, media and information, to recognize risks and thrive online.
Principle 6: Minors’ safety is safeguarded by the implementation of risk management, assessment and mitigation, and following safety-by-design approaches.
Principle 7: Building a safer and more secure digital space for minors is enabled by digital service providers’ cooperation with relevant stakeholders.
The European Commission welcomed the G7 agreement on the abopve principles.
What is the background to this? “The agreed principles are firmly based on the EU’s ambitious approach, which combines decisive enforcement actions to hold platforms accountable with a collective societal effort to strengthen media literacy and raise awareness. Specifically, they reflect existing measures at EU level to protect and empower children, from the Digital Services Act (DSA) and its Guidelines on the protection of minors, over the Better Internet for Kids Strategy (BIK+), to the AI Act and the action plan against cyberbullying, and beyond.”
UNICEF also welcomed the G7 digital and technology ministers’ landmark agreement on common principles for a safer digital space for children.
Bureau Européen des Unions de Consommateurs (BEUC*) filed a complaint against Meta, TikTok and Google with the European Commission and the competent national Digital Services Coordinators together with 29 members across 27 countries. (*BEUC is the umbrella group for 42 independent consumer organisations from 31 countries.)
What does this mean? “Under the Digital Services Act (DSA), Meta, TikTok and Google are required to have effective mechanisms in place to fight fraudulent ads and reduce the risks to consumers. However, our evidence gathering shows that Meta, TikTok and Google not only fail to pro-actively remove fraudulent ads but also do little when notified about such scams.”
What is the background to this? “The findings show that financial scams remain widespread on Meta, TikTok, and Google, and that platforms systematically fail to take effective corrective actions.
In total, we flagged 893 fraudulent ads across 13 countries that were active on either Meta, TikTok or Google.In a nutshell, consumer groups found that:
Meta rejected nearly 43% of the submitted ads.
TikTok only removed 21% of the submitted ads. In 37% of the cases, TikTok claimed that the ad was removed before they could review it.
Google removed 60% of the submitted ads.”
Guidelines, opinions, reports & more
The European Commission is seeking feedback on its draft guidelines on trusted flaggers, organisations specialised in identifying illegal content online. Feedback can be provided by 10 July.
What is it about? “The draft guidelines clarify the criteria, as well as the process by which the Digital Services Coordinators award the ‘trusted flagger' status. They also provide guidance on the technical requirements trusted flaggers and platforms should follow when processing notices of illegal content. Finally, the guidelines aim to ensure trusted flaggers remain independent, objective and accountable, and that they are operating in full respect of freedom of expression. The guidelines also include measures to safeguard the integrity of trusted flaggers, to ensure the mechanism is not misused. These measures include public annual transparency reports by trusted flaggers, as well as procedures to suspend or revoke the status of trusted flaggers.”
More than 70 trusted flaggers have already been appointed under the DSA.
The Commission has published a study mapping key stakeholders and assessing the early stages of implementation of the trusted flaggers mechanism.
The DSA Observatory published an analysis, “State of Play of DSA Dispute Settlement: Meaningful Redress, Uneven Results”.
What is it about? “After almost two years of certified out-of-court dispute settlement (ODS) bodies operating under Article 21 of the Digital Services Act (DSA), the first transparency reports provide early evidence of how this new due process layer operates in practice. Drawing on 2025 data from multiple ODS bodies, this article assesses what value the system is already delivering, and where current constraints, including platform participation and information-sharing, limit its effectiveness. We discuss possible ways forward, including stronger incentives, technical infrastructure and feedback loops.”
The DSA Observatory also published an analysis, titled “Digital Fairness Act: Why we need an ambitious DFA to protect digital consumers from manipulative and addictive design practices” (by John Albert, Marijn Sax, and Natali Helberger).
What is it about? “In this policy brief, we advocate for an ambitious Digital Fairness Act that futureproofs EU consumer law and protects consumers from the full range of unfair digital commercial practices across digital services, including deceptive interfaces, manipulative design, and addictive features. This brief builds on proposals developed in the report “Towards Digital Fairness”.”
Pál Szilágyi wrote about a recent German court judgment (OLG Dresden, 14 UKl 3/25) on Art. 25 DSA, assessing dark patterns in the online booking process.
What is it about? “The DSA expressly excludes from its scope practices that fall within the ambit of the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive 2005/29/EC (UCPD), even where the UCPD does not prohibit them. […] This reasoning is consistent with the earlier OLG Bamberg decision (GRUR-RR 2025, 238) and establishes an important principle: the DSA dark pattern prohibition is residual in nature, it only applies where the UCPD leaves a gap.”
Global Advisory Experts published a Compliance Checklist for Streaming Platforms, Creators & Publishers in Germany.
What is it about? “This guide delivers the step-by-step compliance checklists, contract templates and implementation roadmaps that streaming platforms, content creators and publishers need right now to meet their obligations under the DSA and the DDG in 2026.”
Eucrim published an “Overview of the Latest Developments Under the Digital Services Act: November 2025 - February 2026” (by Dr. Anna Pingen).
What is it about? “This news item continues the reporting on the latest DSA developments by giving a chronological overview. It covers the period from November 2025 to February 2026.”
Further DSA resources