The European Commission is looking to hire 60 staff members for its Digital Services Act (DSA) enforcement unit, as none of the probes that it began against Big Tech platforms since December 2023 have been wrapped up.
The Commission said it plans to recruit a range of different profiles, from legal and policy officers to data scientists and researchers, and is keeping applications open until 10 May.
In a report published last month, the Commission said it hired 51 staff members in 2024 to work on the DSA but admitted that the “recruitment procedures took longer than foreseen and resulted in a yearly lower average amount of full-time contracts than forecasted.”
A spokesperson for the Commission said there are now 127 staff members working on the DSA.
“The new recruitments aims to support the ongoing cases, as well as the general enforcement of the DSA,” the spokesperson added.
The aim is to grow to 200 by the end of this year.
Investigations
The DSA applied to all online platforms in the EU in February of last year.
The 25 largest platforms – those with more than 45 million users on average per month, including Google, Amazon, Meta, Shein and X – are supervised by the Commission, while those falling below that threshold remain the responsibility of the member states.
Since the DSA came into force, the Commission has opened investigations into X, Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, TikTok, AliExpress and Temu. None of these probes have been closed yet.
The most advanced investigation is into X for an alleged lack of transparency and accountability requirements, preliminary findings published last July showed.
The Republican US government that took office in January has criticised what it describes as the harmful impact of the EU’s online platforms rules, and technology legislation in general, as discriminatory non-tariff barriers to trade.
Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Committee told an audience at Mobile World Congress in February, that the DSA is “an attack on free speech”.
In an interview with Euronews, EU Tech Commissioner Henna Virkkunen said that the digital rules are “fair” because they apply to all platforms.
“We have the same rules for European companies, American companies, and Chinese companies,” she said.
