“Thank you very much and thank you very much to all the members for these very legitimate questions and comments. I would start with the first question on the threshold and the procedure why it takes us so long after someone, a platform or a service provider publishes the number. Obviously all this process requires due diligence. I would like to remind that we are before the court on against Zalando or Zalando against the Commission, Amazon, several pornographic platforms are contesting the designation for different reasons because we did not use the right number because they do not consider that the service has been well defined etcetera etcetera. We need to move fast and we are moving fast but we need to be solid in our arguments and this is something that requires due diligence, right of defense with the service provider to speak with the service provider and identify whether we are defining the service that is designated correctly. Also because this will be key for the enforcement. It's for instance in the case of WhatsApp it is important to understand whether the WhatsApp stories are a platform or not because it could also potentially have illegal content on it or whether a group becomes a platform after a certain number of users. So there are many technical questions that need to be solved and as fast as possible. This is something that it's not in contradiction with fast action and I repeat as the report shows the Commission has moved very fast in the designation of already twenty five services and even the designation of a service once they lost the favor of the public. So if we have to combine the need to act fast, it's not political pressure, we also are pressed to deliver fast and in my humble opinion I think we are delivering. And this takes me to the second point or the focus of several comments that the Commission needs to act faster in the enforcement. The DSA started applying for the very large online platforms four months after designation. This brings us to September twenty twenty three, so it's two years ago. We have opened fourteen investigations, we have closed two partially, one case totally, one partially with commitments from the very large online platform at case and we also have seven preliminary findings which requires a lot of evidence gathering, robust legal drafting, robust legal arguing because it will end up in court and we do not want to have a headline today and a bad headline tomorrow because the court does not agree with our assessment. If you compare with parallel enforcement of other instruments of equal importance like the GDPR it took much longer first to negotiate then to start into application and then bring in results. It is something that we are doing, we are moving as fast as we can and as robust as we have to. Then I also have questions on why do we have overlaps at all if it is easy to clarify. I just to bring a bit of the words are in Latin for a reason. These overlaps exist in law, exists and usually there will be sector specific rules and horizontal rules that need to be adapted and interpret usually on a case by case basis. And that brings me to the question on the dark patterns and the Digital Fairness Act. This is a valid question, very fair question that will need to be checked once the Commission has a proposal and then obviously the colleges' latest will have to check that the DSA is not the alpha and omega. I may say it is the alpha and omega for platforms but the digital world goes way beyond online platforms and there is a space to be covered in order to protect consumers, in order to protect children, in order to protect vulnerable consumers. So it is not that the DSA impedes further legislation. The work that call legislators and hopefully with the help of the Commission will be to make different laws that are consistent with each other and robust. So this is also an element that will bridge with the next point and my colleagues will also focus on the simplification efforts. Obviously we can explain everything with a legal argument but ideally we should make a legal framework that is also easy for operators to navigate in order to be able to focus on innovation. This is my point.”
Digital platforms liability for harmful and illegal content · EU rules on digital competition · Interoperability requirements for digital platforms