The EU Digital Services Act: Ready to meet reporting obligations?

The EU Digital Services Act aims to create a safer digital space and enhance accountability of intermediary services. Content moderation and reporting is of crucial importance to achieving this goal. For the first time, in 2025 all companies within the scope of the DSA are required to publish transparency reports.

Although the very large online platforms and very large online search engines designated under the DSA have already been subject to the reporting obligations for the past two years, no standard or best practice has been established, and the DSA has left intermediary services in the dark on how to comply with its transparency reporting obligations in Article 15.

To address this uncertainty, the European Commission published in November 2024 the transparency reporting implementing regulation concerning the form, content and reporting period for transparency reporting requirements and outlining what companies are required to do.

What steps do businesses need to take to ensure compliance with obligations for transparency reporting and statements of reason under the DSA?

Overview

The DSA applies to companies providing intermediary services, which include mere conduit, caching and hosting services, as well as search engines. For hosting services, the DSA introduced the additional category of online platforms and, of course, special rules applying to VLOPs and VLOSEs.

The differentiation by the type of business aims to apply proportionate obligations according to the provider's societal impact. This results in a complicated structure of the DSA's material scope and of the applicability of the various obligations. Some of these obligations are related to reporting.

Transparency report

Providers of all types of intermediary services are required to publish transparency reports at least once a year. However, this obligation differs greatly for the various types of intermediary services with the goal of applying proportionate obligations to their societal impact.