The European Commission on Tuesday published a list of online platforms and search engines that reach 45 million monthly users in Europe, thus qualifying for extra scrutiny.
Net giants that reach that threshold are subject to the strictest obligations under the EU's Digital Services Act. The Commission will have direct supervisory powers over them and will charge them a fee.
Alongside American giants Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook, and China's Alibaba and TikTok, the list includes Dutch company Booking and Germany's Zalando, based on the number of active end-users they were required to declare by mid-February.
In total, seventeen "very large online platforms" and two "very large search engines" will be subject to specific rules because they reach more than 10% of Europe's 450 million consumers, and thus present "particular risks of disseminating illegal content and causing societal harm."
The platforms concerned are Alibaba AliExpress; Amazon Marketplace; Apple AppStore; Booking.com; Facebook; Google Play; Google Maps; Google Shopping; Instagram; LinkedIn; Pinterest; Snapchat; TikTok; Twitter; Wikipedia; YouTube and Zalando, and the search engines Bing and Google Search.
The Digital Services Act, which came into force last November, provides for four categories of digital services to be subject to cumulative obligations. The very large platforms and search engines will be the most regulated. The Commission is thus empowered to monitor them directly.
These obligations aim to protect online users, especially minors, by requiring designated services to assess and mitigate their systemic risks and to provide robust content moderation tools.
In-depth annual assessments and independent audits are foreseen in the areas of misinformation, attacks on freedom of expression and media, gender-based violence, protection of minors, etc.
To carry out this monitoring, the Commission is empowered to impose a fee on the provider under its supervision, which could be collected for the first time in Autumn 2023. This fee would be capped at 0.05% of the annual global net profit of the previous financial year.
Failure to comply with the obligations can result in fines of up to 6% of global turnover.
