EU online rules are not a stick to beat Big Tech, says Dutch watchdog

Enforcing the Digital Services Act (DSA) should see fighting between the regulator on the one hand and Big Tech CEOs on the other, Martijn Snoep, the Chairman of the Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM), told Euronews in an interview.

Snoep described the fallout in August between X CEO Elon Musk and former EU Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton over worries over disinformation on X “a kind of exaggeration”, said he is not planning to make enforcement “personal”, but “more neutral” instead.

“Enforcement has been centred around Big Tech so far, but I believe this will change, and more and more discussions will start around how to apply the rules to smaller platforms,” he said.

The ACM is the national regulator — Digital Services Coordinator (DSC) – responsible for checking the compliance of the platform rules of companies based in the Netherlands. 

The DSA, which became applicable last February to all platforms and is meant to empower online users, obliges companies to comply with transparency and election integrity requirements. The 25 largest platforms, those that have more than 45 million monthly users in the EU such as Amazon, Meta, X and Temu, face the strictest set of rules. 

Priority areas

The ACM has listed three priority areas for enforcement action: ensuring that online platforms follow the basic required rules – such as having a point of contact – protecting minors online and tackling irresponsible hosting providers. “We do have hosting companies in sight, but we first need to do some really good research to know if they are non-compliant,” Snoep said, adding that he hopes to take “swift action” to ensure a level playing field. 

The incoming European Commission, which took office last Sunday, has also put online child safety also high on its list of priorities. A set of guidelines under the DSA is expected in the spring of 2025. In addition, advertising and dark patterns are named as new areas that might require extra rules. However, according to the Dutch regulator, new rules should not be drawn up just yet. 

“My preference would be to wait a bit with new legislation. First let's see what this yields. I would rather see that our capacity is used for supervision than that we have to go through such a legislative process again,” Snoep said.

Not fully enforced

The ACM is only provisionally assigned the role of DSC – the first point of contact for platforms – until the implementing law has been approved by the national parliament. Even though this is foreseen in the next few months, the country has missed the EU Commission deadline of February, and now faces an infringement procedure from Brussels.

However, the authority has already begun taking in complaints, receiving 227 until now. The majority (135) relate to companies based elsewhere in Europe, with the remaining 92 relating to Netherlands-based enterprises. 

“We can send those foreign ones on to other regulators, but we cannot yet take enforcement action ourselves, nor can we formally force people to provide information,” Snoep said. 

With some 30 staff members today and the intention to grow, Snoep thinks the regulator will be well equipped in future. “We always have to prioritize, because I can't open 92 investigations, so we have to prioritize, and focus on basic compliance, hosting providers and minors.”

He adds that “100% compliance will never happen", that there will always be a certain degree of non-compliance, which society must understand.

“It will be quite a big change for digital platforms, coming from a completely free, unregulated market to suddenly a regulated one. So I expect that it will take a number of years before they are used to it."