EU Digital Services Act Requires Clear Terms Summaries From the Largest Platforms
The European Union's Digital Services Act (DSA) makes terms and conditions a formal transparency issue, not merely a legal or user-experience concern. Under the regulation, providers of very large online platforms and very large online search engines must publish concise, easily accessible and machine-readable summaries of their terms. Those summaries must use clear and unambiguous language and…
The EU's Digital Services Act (DSA) mandates that very large online platforms and search engines provide clear, easily accessible and machine-readable summaries of their terms and conditions. This requirement, outlined in Article 14, sets them apart from other intermediary services that must simply offer clear, plain and intelligible terms.
The summaries must be in the official languages of the EU Member States where the service is offered and include main elements like remedies and redress mechanisms. The DSA's emphasis on machine readability aims to make the information more useful for automated tools, complementing the requirement for human-readable summaries. While covered platforms need to regularly update these summaries as the terms change, maintaining a governance framework that ties legal, product, localisation and publication aspects together is crucial for ongoing compliance.
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