Speeches

Mr President, Europe, we are losing this game. We need to stop giving big speeches on Europe's competitiveness and wanting to have European digital champions if we suffocate them with regulation at the same time. Regulatory burden, uncertainty and lack of capital to grow are among the reasons for companies to leave the EU. We must enable and not restrict use of data. We are losing our best and most promising companies to more agile markets. Finnish innovative start-up Solar Foods is struggling to launch their products here due to our heavy approval processes. Dutch digital champion Booking.com slams the EU over dumb regulation. We must streamline, cut and simplify, and remember that the devil is in the details. We need to hold the new Commission accountable and make sure they don't propose any new regulations in the field of digital. With concrete actions, we need to make the EU a place where innovation thrives and not dies under the paperwork.

Mr President, as far as we can see, a lot of ongoing work to enforce the DSA is progressing well and shows a serious commitment to protecting and empowering users online, by requiring platforms to assess, mitigate and act against their systemic risks and to provide the right content moderation tools to do so, as well as clear information to users on possible misbehaviour. This shows that the DSA can work well, but that is only the case when things are done correctly. This is not a tool for preventing something that might be said. Nothing should endanger freedom of speech. Politicising the enforcement of the DSA is an incredibly dangerous thing to do. The DSA is designed to uphold the rights of millions of Europeans by addressing systemic risks. It is not a tool for censorship, and abusing it in this manner will defeat the purpose of the law. Instead, the Commission needs to keep working to fine-tune enforcement so it works as uniformly and efficiently as possible in all Member States. This has to be evidence-based and process-focused. In this House, we are closely following the impact of the law and whether we need to review some of its elements in the future.