Mr. Mark Dugdale:

I thank the Deputy. I am on track now. There is no individual complaints handling mechanism, in which the DSC would be involved. There is a due diligence obligation that applies to platforms of a hosting service nature and above; therefore, hosting services, online platforms and very large online platforms, VLOPs, would be required to have in place an internal complaints handling system. The DSCs would be responsible for ensuring those systems were working. They would not be responsible for dealing with individual complaints.

The one area where the DSA gets involved with individual areas of illegal content is through a provision, which states that competent authorities in the member states in which something is illegal can act and here one needs to bear in mind that the definition of "illegal content" in the DSA is anything which is illegal in any member state or under European harmonised law. If a particular piece of hate speech was illegal in Germany and being disseminated by Facebook, the German authorities would be able, under the Act, issue a notice to Facebook to take down that material.

Facebook would then be obliged to respond to that notice. This is an area in which the company has to strike a balance between the rights of the provider of the information and the right to freedom of expression, and it would then decide whether to take that down and would have to notify the German authorities; first, as to whether it had taken it down or, second, that it had not taken it down and did not intend to do so.

The German authorities would then have the responsibility under their law to take legal action in Germany to have that content removed, and there would be very specific territorial scope to do so. If something is illegal in Germany, but not in the vast majority of the rest of the Union, it would not need to be taken down elsewhere. I hope that helps with regard to the way the DSA deals with individual areas of illegal content. However, the Act does not allow for individual complaints to be made to digital services co-ordinators per se.