The Digital Services Act introduced today by the European Commission demonstrates to what extent Europe has lost its digital illusions and ambitions. Where the 2000 e-commerce directive was an attempt – admittedly failed – to develop a successful digital single market, the DSA is only a proposal for technical regulation aimed, apparently, at limiting the power of the digital winners – a.k.a. the « GAFAs ». The Commission’s proposal should, however, please large platforms, as it follows almost all their requests. The 2000 e-commerce Directive was ambitious: at that time, the European Union still hoped that digital technology would be European and create jobs. « The development of electronic commerce in the information society offers important opportunities for employment in the Community, in particular in small and medium-sized enterprises », said its second recital. Unfortunately, almost nothing was done afterwards to build a strong European digital sector on the basis of the harmonization and the few legal semi-certainties provided by this text, while the largely funded international players – Google, Facebook, Snap, Amazon , Airbnb and many others – have been able to take advantage of the European Single Market. Twenty years later, it is clear that European digital technology, and especially in SMEs, still has no momentum: the few continental successes – we think in particular of Spotify, Zalando or Believe – have all been funded mainly outside the EU. Unfortunately, the vital instinct that is lacking in Europe when it comes to digital is also absent from the Digital Services Act proposal presented today by the European Commission. The much anticipated text, which has been the subject of a feverish wait, is today presented not as an attempt to push digital technology in Europe, but as an attempt to…
