Lazar Radic on the DMA and DSA

ICLE Senior Scholar Lazar Radic was quoted by EurActiv in a story about the European Union’s Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act. You can read the full piece here.

The June European Parliament elections serve as a clear and definitive milestone for the DSA, prompting swift action from policymakers, said Lazar Radic, a senior scholar for competition policy at the International Center for Law & Economics and adjunct professor of law at IE University, told Euractiv.

He warned, however, that there remains ambiguity in the DSA in defining what constitutes misinformation.

“There is also the question of censorship and the threat of the DSA becoming a tool for not suppressing misinformation but perpetuating biases or misinformation,” he said.

Radic suggested that the Commission’s guidelines on elections are intended to clarify these definitions, particularly regarding misinformation ahead of the June elections.

…“This was immediately after the workshop [which] was supposed to foster communication between the Commission and the gatekeepers. I and others have been scratching our heads. What was the point of this?” said Radic.

He said the Commission had likely had investigations planned way before the workshops. The Commission might have hoped the gatekeepers would address previously identified concerns during the workshops, but the probes may have been decided regardless of the workshop outcomes, the scholar said.

Radic added that there might also be “a disciplinary element to [the measures]. The Commission wants to signal that it’s serious.”

“The Commission keeps saying that competition law and DMA are completely different things. But here we have yet another example of that continuum between the two,” he said. “In fact, the two are deployed at the same exact time.”