On Wednesday 1 February, the European Commission published non-binding guidelines for online platforms and search engines falling under the scope of the Digital Services Act (DSA) (see EUROPE 13068/6).
These guidelines should, among other things, help industry players affected by the DSA to comply with their obligation to publish user numbers in the EU by 17 February 2023. They will then have to do this at least once every 6 months.
These obligations may be updated and revised in the coming months, based on the results observed.
As a reminder, other obligations could be put in place by the European Commission for very large online platforms, qualified as such once they reach 45 million users.
These additional obligations could, for example, require them to carry out a risk assessment or to take risk mitigation measures.
The DSA, one of the two pillars of the digital package together with the Digital Markets Act (DMA) (see EUROPE 13054/14), was presented by the European Commission in December 2020. The text on the DSA entered into force on 16 November (see EUROPE 13064/18). (Original version in French by Thomas Mangin)