Abstract

The Digital Services Act (DSA) constitutes a major overhaul of the fundamental legal framework regulating the provision of online services. The DSA also introduces significant measures impacting the online advertising sector, and this article aims to outline the most important ones in this regard.
The article discusses what trends in online advertising have been identified as potentially harmful and what aims have been set for the DSA to combat them. The article describes the definitions of an “advertisement” and “commercial communication” in the DSA, and how their scopes relate to online advertising as carried out in practice, in particular influencer marketing activities. It also discusses what factors may affect compliance of advertising with the law in light of the DSA, as well as the regulations on dealing with advertisements that fail to comply with the law or a platform’s terms of service.
The article also describes the obligations placed by the DSA on online platforms and very large online platforms regarding advertisements and commercial communications, including the obligation to properly mark advertisements and to disclose their audience targeting criteria. It also discusses the obligation to keep advertisement repositories and the impact of advertising on the systemic risk assessment of very large online platforms.