Five EU member countries are being taken to court by the EU Commission for failure to “effectively” comply with the bloc’s online censorship law, the Digital Services Act (DSA).
DSA, and the Digital Markets Act (DMA), are EU’s key regulations often criticized for centralizing the bloc’s power in the digital sphere at the expense of free speech, and tech companies’ business interests – but also, it appears, the sovereignty of member countries.
Among the “May infringements package” covering various areas regulated by the EU is the section dedicated to the digital economy. It is here that the Commission announced legal action against Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Poland, Portugal, and Spain.
These countries have been referred to the Court of Justice of the European Union; Bulgaria, meanwhile, has been put on notice and may eventually also find itself in court, unless it empowers a national digital services coordinator (DSC, a role established under DSA) and “lay down the rules on penalties applicable to infringements (of DSA).”
The EU Commission said that designating and empowering DSCs is an essential step in enforcing the DSA rules and “in ensuring the uniform application” of the regulation across the bloc.
Of the five EU members that are already in court, Poland has not designated or empowered a DSC at all, while the other four have done that – but failed to “entrust them with the necessary powers to carry out their tasks under the DSA.”
All five countries have yet to come up with rules regarding penalties for DSA infringement.
Some observers see the Commission’s decision as another example of EU bureaucracy’s ongoing tendency toward centralization and increasing control over its members.
The five countries taken to court have not rejected the DSA, but Brussels is nonetheless “cracking the whip” and asserting its dominance – just in case that what’s behind slow compliance (in this and other matters) turns out to be the hesitation to fully, and swiftly, defer to the bloc.
The EU started out as an economic community facilitating cooperation between sovereign nations but has since been steadily moving toward ever greater political and ideological centralization – something very well served by laws like DSA, and their emphasis on “disinformation” and other smokescreens for controlling diverse online discourse.