Unleashing Transparency: How the EU’s Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act Will Impact Online Publishers

Are you a publisher or intermediary dealing with websites and online advertising? Then you’ll want to pay attention to the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) and Digital Markets Act (DMA). These new regulations aim to increase transparency and shake up the online landscape, impacting the way you do business.

What is Digital Services Act

The Digital Services Act refers, inter alia, to entrepreneurs providing hosting of content supplied by users. One interpretation of this definition might be associated even with the operation of a discussion forum or allowing users to comment on the articles published. 

Regulations of Digital Services Act

1. Regulating an unlawful content releases

The DSA specifies the rules for releasing publishers from liability for unlawful content posted on their websites. It points out that they must introduce the possibility of reporting illegal content to be available for the users. But this change is definitely not a revolutionary one, because similar conditions already resulted from the regulations that were already in force before.

What is important here, is the fact that the DSA does not define what is considered as unlawful or illegal content. This might be defined in other laws either at EU level, but some additional categories of content might be considered as illegal by regulations introduced at national level. The example of unlawful content at the EU level is terrorist content or illegal hate speech.  

2. Excluding sensitive data usage

The Digital Services Act also excludes the possibility of profiling and targeting children, as well as profiling users based on sensitive data. The sensitive data includes but is not limited to the person’s health or sexual orientation. In some jurisdictions the regulations that covered this were already in place. 

3. Prohibiting “dark patterns”

The Digital Services Act also prohibits the use of so-called “dark patterns”. An example of such a pattern is the usage of malicious elements built into the website design. Something that would fit this description and was present for a long time would an ad displayed on a layer, that in theory can be closed by pressing “X” button, while in reality the click redirects user to another page on the site. This might also include highlighting the button to accept marketing consents while at the same time reducing the size of the button to reject these consents.

4. Tagging sponsored content

Another obligation arising from the Digital Services Act is the need to appropriately mark broadcasted advertisements and provide the user with real-time information on whose behalf the advertisement was presented, who paid for it, and what parameters were used to determine the target group of the advertisement. An example of this could be seen in Poland on Facebook, when the ad bought before the recent elections were clearly marked as sponsored by specific parties. 

It is clear as day that the above obligation is enforceable only with a lot of support from the tech giants (e.g. Google) that serve the markets where these ads are bought and sold. Without their support, this information is not available directly to the publisher, so it could not be presented.

What is Digital Markets Act

The Digital Markets Act, in turn, is a document related mostly to the largest entities (such as Google, Facebook and Amazon), which are to be the so-called “guardians of access”. They would need to comply with several obligations in order to maintain the competitiveness of economic operators in digital markets. 

What should publishers expect?

Our preliminary analysis shows that it will not directly impose new obligations on publishers. Due to the fact that large entities are covered by these obligations, this may indirectly affect some changes, e.g. in the content monetization rules applied by these entities. Hence, at this point, it’s difficult to specify what the publishers should expect from the enforcement of the DMA. 

For example, we expect Google to introduce some additional measures in place in order to present the data required by the Digital Services Act They will probably take place somewhere in the Google Ad Manager interface, in a form of a feature that needs to be turned on (opt-in), or rather is going to be turned on by default, but the published can opt-out of it for given geos. 

If you would  like to learn more about what is coming to the programmatic markets in the following months, and figure a way to make the most of the expected changes, reach out to Yieldbird. Schedule a call with our experts to discuss how we can help you grow your programmatic business.

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