Under new EU laws, Google, Meta, and others will be required to explain their algorithms.

The Digital Services Act will change the face of the internet.
Another ambitious piece of legislation to govern the internet world has been agreed upon by the EU.

The group agreed on the general outlines of the Digital Services Act, or DSA, early Saturday morning following hours of discussions. The DSA would oblige digital companies to take greater responsibility for information that appears on their platforms. New responsibilities include eliminating unlawful content and items more swiftly, explaining how their algorithms function to users and researchers, and enforcing stronger rules against the spread of disinformation. Noncompliance can result in fines of up to 6% of a company’s annual sales.

In a statement, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said, “The DSA will enhance the ground-rules for all online services in the EU.” “It puts the concept that what is unlawful physically should also be illegal online into practise.” The larger the magnitude of an internet platform, the higher its responsibility.”
The legislation would “guarantee that platforms are held accountable for the dangers their services might pose to society and citizens,” said Margrethe Vestager, the European Commissioner for Competition who has led most of the bloc’s digital regulation.

The DSA is not to be confused with the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which was passed in March. Both act have an impact on the tech industry, but the DMA is more concerned with levelling the playing field between firms, and the DSA is more concerned with how organisations police material on their platforms. As a result, the DSA is more likely to have an immediate impact on internet users.

Although the legislation solely affects EU people, its impact will undoubtedly be seen in other areas of the world. Global internet corporations may conclude that implementing a unified content policing approach and using the EU’s fairly strict standards as a baseline is more cost-effective. While politicians in the United States are looking to the EU’s laws for inspiration in order to reign in Big Tech with their own restrictions, the EU’s policies are already being used as a model.
Although the full wording of the DSA has not been revealed, the European Parliament and the European Commission have outlined a number of duties that will be included:

• Advertising that targets people based on their religion, sexual orientation, or ethnicity is illegal. Targeted advertising is also prohibited for minors.
• Dark patterns, or user interfaces that are intentionally misleading or deceptive in order to lead users to make specific decisions, will be disallowed. Subscription cancellation should, in general, be as simple as signing up for them, according to the EU.
• Large online platforms, such as Facebook, will have to make the operation of their recommender algorithms accessible to users (for example, for categorising material in the News Feed or proposing TV series on Netflix). A recommender system “not based on profiling” should be available to users as well. This would imply a chronological feed on Instagram, for example (as it introduced recently).

• Hosting firms and internet platforms would be required to explain why they deleted unlawful information and to allow users to challenge such removals. However, the DSA does not define what content is unlawful and instead leaves it up to individual countries to decide.
• Researchers will need access to important data from the main internet platforms in order to “get a better understanding of how online hazards emerge.”
• To hunt down those selling unlawful products or services, online marketplaces must preserve basic information on dealers on their platforms.
• During crises, large platforms will also need to implement new tactics for dealing with disinformation (a provision inspired by the recent invasion of Ukraine).

The DSA, like the DMA, would discriminate between different sizes of tech businesses, with larger corporations having higher responsibilities. The major companies, such as Meta and Google, which have at least 45 million users in the EU, will be scrutinised the most. These internet corporations have fought aggressively to weaken the DSA’s rules, notably those relating to targeted advertising and disclosing data to third parties.

Although the EU member states have agreed on the general outlines of the DSA, the legislative text must still be finished before the act can be voted into law. However, at this point, the final step is considered a formality. The rules will take effect 15 months after the measure is signed into law, or on January 1, 2024, whichever comes first.