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EU Commission gathered €58m in fees for supervising digital platforms

Several online platforms have launched a legal proceeding against the fees imposed for being a Very Large Online Platform under the Digital Services Act.

The European Commission has charged the largest online platform providers in the EU a total of €58.2 million in supervisory fees last year, it disclosed in a report to the European Parliament and member states published on Monday.

The fees – charged to the largest online platforms with more than 45 million users per month – are meant to cover the Digital Services Act (DSA) enforcement activities of the Commission in 2025, as well as human resources and administration costs, the EU executive said.

The fee for each individual platform may not be greater than 0.05% of the service provider’s worldwide profit in the preceding financial year.

Three online platforms – Meta, TikTok and Google – have together filed five court cases against the supervisory fees on their platforms, all of which are still pending.

The DSA, which aims to increase transparency and make platforms accountable for counterfeit and illegal content online – entered into force in late 2023, but only became applicable to all online platforms in February 2024.

Since 2023, the Commission has designated some 25 Very Large Online Platforms, which include Meta, TikTok, Amazon, Shein, LinkedIn and Zalando.

Recruitment

During the reporting period of 2024, the Commission said it sent some 100 requests for information to the largest platforms and opened nine formal proceedings against several providers.

The Commission hired 51 staff members last year to work on the DSA, which includes legal and policy officers, data scientists, technology specialists, communications officers, budget and audit specialists and project managers.

“The recruitment procedures took longer than foreseen and resulted in a yearly lower average amount of fulltime contracts than forecasted,” the report said.

The report also said that the fees collected in 2023 did not cover all Commission expenses related to the DSA last year, resulting in a deficit of €514,061.

None of the probes that the Commission started under the DSA have been wrapped up yet.

The most advanced investigation is into X for an alleged lack of transparency and accountability requirements, preliminary findings published last July showed.