The DSA has a broad scope and regulates many aspects of digital services, including in the fintech space.
By Gail E. Crawford, Jean-Luc Juhan, Susan Kempe-Mueller, Deborah J. Kirk, Lars Kjølbye, Elisabetta Righini, Sven B. Völcker, Ben Leigh, Victoria Wan, and Amy Smyth
As a key part of the EU’s digital regulation strategy, the Digital Services Act (DSA) seeks to modernise legal frameworks and create a safer and more open digital environment.
It regulates many aspects of digital services, including liability for online content and services, targeted advertising, know-your-business-customer requirements, transparency for users, and managing systemic platform risks.
On 8 April 2019, the Home Office and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) published an “Online Harms White Paper”, proposing a new compliance and enforcement regime intended to combat online harms. The regime is designed to force online platforms to move away from self-regulation and sets out a legal framework to tackle users’ illegal and socially harmful activity. Although the regime appears to target larger social media platforms, the proposals technically extend to all organisations that provide online platforms allowing user interaction or user-generated content (not limited to social media companies or even ‘service providers’ in the traditional sense) and set out a potentially onerous and punitive compliance and enforcement regime for a broad set of online providers.