The EU proposes the Digital Services and Markets Acts
Two separate proposals — due-diligence duties for platforms under the DSA, and obligations on large 'gatekeepers' under the DMA — took over a year to negotiate into law.
- Government & policy
- Minor
The European Commission published its proposals for the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Digital Markets Act (DMA), the most significant rewrite of the EU’s rules for online platforms since the e-Commerce Directive two decades earlier. The two instruments were separate: the DSA set new due-diligence obligations, scaled to a platform’s size and role, covering how services like social networks and marketplaces must handle illegal content and user complaints; the DMA targeted a smaller set of very large “gatekeeper” platforms with obligations and prohibitions aimed at keeping digital markets contestable.
Neither proposal was framed around artificial intelligence specifically — both were general platform-governance instruments, addressing content moderation, transparency and market power on services that existed regardless of what AI systems ran inside them. The Commission had signalled the package as part of its “Shaping Europe’s Digital Age” agenda set out in early 2020, alongside a separate white paper on AI regulation that would eventually mature into the EU AI Act.
The proposals then went through more than a year of negotiation between the Commission, Parliament and member states before either was finalised. Their lasting relevance to the AI story is less their content than the precedent they set: they established the risk-tiered, obligation-scaled-to-size regulatory template, and the enforcement machinery built to police it, that Brussels would reuse when it turned to regulating AI systems directly.