Digital Services Act

The Digital Services Act (DSA) is a law created by the European Union that places stricter responsibilities on online services with more than 45 million users in the EU per month. It's a bit like how a school might have basic rules that every student must follow, but a much larger school with far more students is also required to have extra safety staff and run emergency drills more often.

Services covered by this law can't target minors with advertising, and they're also banned from using sensitive information like sexual orientation, religion, or political views to serve targeted ads. They also have to be more transparent about the criteria their recommendation algorithms use to select and show content.

The law was originally designed with visible platforms like social media and online marketplaces in mind, but as conversational services like ChatGPT that help users find information have grown in scale, they're increasingly being brought under this law's scope as well.

News reports say the service was "designated as a Very Large Online Search Engine (VLOSE) under the Digital Services Act (DSA)" for ChatGPT. What's easy to misunderstand here is that this law isn't a special regulation aimed only at ChatGPT — it's a common set of rules that applies to any online service exceeding a certain number of EU users. In fact, Reddit and Roblox were also designated under different categories on the same day.