The European Union’s pursuit of making Big Tech compliant with its DSA (Digital Services Act) continues, with ChatGPT, Reddit, and Roblox being reminded by the politico-economic partnership of 27 countries to adhere to the regional regulations drafted for enormous online platforms and search engines.
The reminder came amid the services declaring about reaching at least 45 million monthly users in the EU.
“This growth qualifies them for the ‘very large’ designation under the bloc’s Digital Services Act,” the European Commission, the EU’s main executive arm, said.
As per the new ultimatum, ChatGPT, Reddit, and Roblox have four months to comply with additional obligations following their designation.
This also includes assessing and mitigating risks of illegal content being disseminated through the tech companies’ platforms.
“They also need to mitigate the negative effects on minors and on the physical and mental wellbeing of users,” the European Commission added further.
“Very large platforms and search engines also need to limit risks for fundamental rights, electoral processes, and public security,” the regulatory body reiterated.
The Commission has been given the mandate to supervise compliance with the DSA and use its investigative powers to assess functionalities behind the services.
DSA has classified ChatGPT as an online search engine instead of a chatbot.
Gaming platform Roblox and discussion-based platform Reddit qualify as online platforms, as they enable users to disseminate third-party content to the public.
In recent days, the EU has intensified its efforts against Big Tech, as part of which it also compelled Alphabet’s Google to revise its spam policy in Europe to address concerns that could have led to an antitrust fine.
The American tech giant came under scrutiny from EU regulators after publishers raised concerns about its policy on site reputation abuse.
Google is known for targeting the practice of publishing third-party pages on a site as an attempt to abuse search rankings by taking advantage of the host site’s ranking signals, commonly referred to as parasite SEO.
Concerns about the policy had prompted the European Commission to open an investigation under the Digital Markets Act (DMA).
The monitoring found the tech giant’s spam policy of demoting news media and other publishers’ websites and content in Google search results, when those websites include content from commercial partners.
After facing the regulator heat, Google has decided that from August 30, any manual actions taken to demote sites would not apply to users in the 27 EU nations, Iceland, Norway, and Liechtenstein (the European Economic Area).
“The policy would not change outside the European Economic Area,” it added.
“We welcome the repeal of this policy, which unfairly penalized publishers and other business users of Google Search. Thanks to the DMA, it will no longer demote press publications solely for hosting third-party content,” EU Commission spokesman Thomas Regnier said.
“The Commission will now monitor the application of the new policy to ensure it is compliant with the DMA,” the senior official stated further.
DMA breaches can cost companies fines of up to 10% of their global annual turnover.