European Commission and Ofcom sign administrative arrangement

IRIS 2024-6:1/16

Eric Munch

European Audiovisual Observatory

On 13 May 2024, the European Commission announced that DG CNECT, the Directorate-General responsible for the enforcement of the Digital Services Act (DSA), has signed an administrative arrangement with Ofcom, the United Kingdom’s media regulator. Similar agreements had already been signed between the Commission and the French and Irish media regulators (respectively the Autorité de regulation de la communication audiovisuelle et numérique and Coimisiún na Meán).

The arrangement will support both actors’ supervisory work with regard to online platforms; the DSA in the case of the Commission and the Online Safety Act in the case of Ofcom. The cooperation will come in the form of a dialogue between technical experts, joint training of technical staff, joint studies, coordinated research projects and the sharing of best practices. It will also reduce cross-border frictions for companies required to comply with both the DSA and the Online Safety Act. The two pieces of legislation share many common interests, such as the protection of minors online, age-appropriate design technologies, the transparency of online platforms, risk assessments and the impact of algorithms on systemic risks for society.

Under the DSA, the Commission is responsible for the supervision and enforcement of provisions applying to designated very large online platforms and search engines (platforms and search engines with more than 45 million monthly users in the EU). Since the DSA’s entry into application, the Commission had already taken action to ensure that the DSA creates a safer online environment, through unprecedented transparency and by offering due process for the content moderation decisions of a platform, but also by offering access to a platform’s public data for researchers and by opening proceedings where it suspects that these platforms may be in breach of the structural obligations of the DSA.

In the UK, Ofcom is still regulating VSPs falling under their jurisdiction under the VSP regime pre-dating the Online Safety Act – the date when the former will be repealed by the latter remaining to be decided by the UK Government. For instance, Ofcom has recently opened an investigation into whether OnlyFans is doing enough to prevent children accessing pornographic content on its site (IRIS 2024-5:1/8).