Who Is A Hosting Service Provider Under The DSA And What New Obligations Does The Provider Have To Meet?

• Published date: 02 April 2024
• Subject Matter: Media, Telecoms, IT, Entertainment, Technology, IT and Internet, Advertising, Marketing & Branding, New Technology
• Law Firm: Schoenherr Attorneys at Law
• Author: Karolina Pikuła

In recent weeks, a new EU regulation, the so-called Digital Services Act, has come into force (the "DSA"). The DSA applies to intermediary services offered to service recipients who are based or located in the EU, regardless of the location of the providers of these intermediary services.

In this edition of the newsletter, we will focus on hosting services. According to the provisions of the DSA, hosting services involve the storage of information provided by and at the request of the recipient of the service.

Given the broad definition of hosting services, many entities can be regarded as providers of such a service. For example, they can be:

• cloud services providers;
• online stores;
• educational platforms;
• entities that offer to create marketing materials, landing pages or pop-ups;
• providers of an application that offers an account service;
• news portals;
• platforms where users have the ability to comment on or share user's content;
• game publishers offering players the opportunity to share their works.

The DSA imposes several obligations on the hosting provider, including:

• designation of a single point of contact to enable communication with authorities and recipients (users) of services;
• appointment...