The European Union’s Digital Services Act is a censorship and surveillance law dressed in the language of safety. It gives unelected officials in Brussels the power to decide what hundreds of millions of people are allowed to say online and it is building the infrastructure to verify their identities before they’re permitted to say it.
But at POLITICO’s AI & Tech Week summit in Brussels this month, Renate Nikolay, the European Commission’s Deputy Director-General at DG CONNECT, celebrated the law’s growing enforcement record. Seventeen ongoing investigations and one non-compliance decision, she told the audience, prove the DSA “delivers.”
What the DSA delivers is pressure. Pressure on platforms to censor more speech, faster, with fewer questions asked. Pressure to open their algorithms and internal systems to government inspection without a court order. And, increasingly, pressure on individual users to prove who they are before they’re allowed to participate in public discourse online.
Nikolay presented these enforcement numbers as proof of success. They are proof of something but not what she thinks.
Hellbound and Down 