It’s compliance time. With the European Union’s AI Act officially active on August 1st (though most regulations not enforceable until 2026), it joins the Digital Services Act (DSA) and Digital Markets Act (DMA), both active in early 2024, and the Data Governance Act (DGA), which kicked into gear in September 2023.
We’ll get into what these cover shortly, but make no mistake, the EU is serious about enforcing their growing slate of regulation and guidance, demonstrated by challenges to nearly all the big tech powerhouses. With billions of dollars in fines already levied, blocked rollouts, required modifications, and a frenzy of investigations, challenges, and counter challenges, the fight is on.
At a time when the US is also starting to push against the scale of big tech companies (for example Google search was ruled to be illegally monopolistic on August 5), the European Union is going much further, faster, and more aggressively in their attempts to protect consumers, enforce transparency, and open up competition.
But are they picking fights they can win, or, in attempting to follow-up on the successes of the GDPR, is the EU going too far?
This week we look at specific EU tech regulations, the impact of current investigations, the key regulatory frameworks, what this may mean for the future of tech regulation, and the increasing difficulty of global compliance.
Digital Services Act (DSA)
Part of extensive e-commerce regulations that went into effect earlier this year, the DSA launched with a long build-up intended to give companies time to get their plans in order.
But this lengthy runway also means its provisions were drafted before AI use became widespread.
The DSA is about content moderation, and, like many of these newer EU regulations, has designations for size, allowing very smal