Big Tech isn’t ready for landmark EU rules that take effect tomorrow [Updated] - Ars Technica

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Tomorrow, the world's biggest tech companies will finally be confronted with a European Union law designed to change the Internet forever—requiring more transparency and accountability from companies operating large platforms like Meta, TikTok, X, Google, Apple, and Amazon than before.

This landmark legislation, the Digital Services Act (DSA), could end up cornering platforms into making a difficult choice: either incur heavy fines or risk disrupting their core business models by making it easier than ever to opt out of recommendation systems. Repeat offenders could be banned from operating in the EU entirely.

Today, as Reuters reported that platforms are bracing for this major change, the question remains: How prepared is the EU to actually enforce the DSA?

Under the DSA, platforms will have to stop harmful content from spreading, stop or limit targeting many users with personalized content and ads, and share insights with researchers into how their opaque algorithms work to recommend content.

Violations could occur if platforms don't provide clear information on what they're recommending to users or how to opt out of those recommendations. Platforms could also risk violations for not diligently processing reports of illegal content.

As of tomorrow, these rules only apply to 19 very large online platforms and search engines, but by mid-February, "they will apply to a variety of online platforms, regardless of size," Reuters reported.

Platforms do not appear to be prepared to comply with the DSA. This summer, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and Snapchat all conducted "stress tests" to see if they could "detect, address and mitigate systemic risks, such as disinformation," Reuters reported, and all five platforms failed to satisfy DSA standards.

The European Commission (EC) instructed platforms to do more to prepare for compliance before the DSA takes effect, but the clock has now run out, and critics have said that platforms may just pay the massive fines that they can easily afford. With questions remaining on how consistent the EU will be with DSA enforcement, accepting that violations may be inevitable could seem worth the risk to some platforms that might anticipate little to no enforcement.

The stakes remain high for the EU, which continues to set the bar for stricter and stricter tech regulations. How effectively these rules can be enforced will likely influence not just how platforms behave and the Internet functions in the EU, but also whether officials everywhere decide to copy legislation like the DSA.

Last year, it seemed immediately clear to pretty much everyone that the DSA would be challenging to enforce. One EU policy expert, Asha Allen—the advocacy director for Europe, Online Expression & Civic Space for the Centre of Democracy and Technology, Europe Office—wrote in a Wired op-ed that when DSA was passed, there "simply" wasn’t "the institutional capacity to enact this legislation effectively."

It's unclear what changed in the past year or if the EU followed through on what Allen claimed was among the most critical steps to effectively support the DSA's ambitious goals: hiring enough "world-class data scientists and experts to aid in the enforcement of the new algorithmic transparency and data accessibility obligations."

"Quite simply, without the meaningful engagement of advocates in the implementation and enforcement of the entire DSA, the potentially groundbreaking provisions we have collectively worked so diligently to obtain in the text won't come to fruition," Allen warned.

Ars couldn't immediately reach the EC or Allen for comment on what has changed since last summer when the commission provided a "sneak peek" of what DSA enforcement would look like. At that point, the EC admitted that "introducing new obligations on platforms and rights for users would be pointless if they are not properly enforced."

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