The DSA has struck again and corporations are trembling. No, not the Mamdani DSA, the other DSA, the EU’s Digital Services Act, Europe’s legal framework for regulating the tech industry, which is also arguably the entire world’s de facto legal framework for regulating the tech industry.
The targets today: Roblox, the gaming sandbox and online space where kids can interact, and where, perhaps too often, adults can interact with kids, along with ChatGPT, the AI chatbot your landlord now uses to write you 1,000-word emails that paraphrase Immanuel Kant when they could just say “Don’t leave extension cords on the driveway. -Jeff.”
The EU’s executive arm is preparing to designate ChatGPT and Roblox as “very large online platforms,” according to an anonymously sourced Bloomberg report. If you’re a tech platform, this label may sound like a cool trophy, but it’s actually an anchor around your neck because it exposes you to the top level of EU regulations and scrutiny.
The threshold to be considered for the designation is 45 million EU-based monthly users, and other members of the very large online platform club include the Amazon Store, TikTok, Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and of course Zalando (It’s European).
text of the law: “Fees per service are calculated using a mathematical formula that takes into account the service’s number of users. The fee may not be greater than 0.05% of the service provider’s worldwide profit in the preceding financial year.”
Bloomberg reached out to the European Commission, OpenAI and Roblox. The commission declined, and OpenAI and Roblox didn’t answer the requests.
The DSA is perhaps most famous in the U.S. for coming into effect in 2022 and almost immediately clashing with Elon Musk amid his Twitter (later X) takeover around the same time. DSA regulators were informally inaugurated as the world’s platform cops in 2023 when the EU went after X for failing to moderate types of content the DSA doesn’t tolerate, and for having design elements thought to be deceptive. X was eventually hit with a $140 million fine, but appeals are ongoing.