Digital Services Act: Does Internet Regulation Threaten Freedom of Expression?

Johanna Rinceanu speaks on air at Deutschlandfunk Nova Radio

Last year, the European Union introduced the Digital Services Act (DSA) to regulate the Internet. Experts warn, however, that freedom of expression is at risk. Criminal law expert Johanna Rinceanu criticizes the fact that private companies such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon are interfering too heavily in the control of public opinion. In a lecture broadcast on the German public radio station Deutschlandfunk Nova, she expresses her concerns about freedom of expression and the role tech companies play in the digital world.

The culture of debate online can be extremely hostile. It is characterized by hate speech, fake news, and insults—and crimes are also being committed online. In addition, the Internet is also a place of surveillance and censorship. So it stands to reason that there are strong calls for regulation. But what could such regulation look like?

Johanna Rinceanu, criminal law scholar and senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law, is an expert on this subject. “The structure of the Internet per se does not allow for simple regulation. Digital platforms operate across borders and have a global reach,” she explains in a lecture broadcast by Deutschlandfunk Nova.

The radical changes in the digital world have brought with them new legal challenges, says Rinceanu. Control of online activity by means of national criminal law has proven to be largely ineffective.

Against this background, the lawyer describes the concentration of power among private technology companies as alarming. The so-called “Big Five”, Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, Meta (Facebook), and Microsoft, enjoy an unchecked monopoly and possess vast economic—and therefore political—influence.

In order to regulate the Internet and social media platforms, the European Union decided to bring corporations “on board”. The Digital Services Act (DSA), which has been in force in the EU since February 2024, requires that online platforms themselves see to it that illegal content is removed. At the same time, they must minimize the risk of illegal content reaching the platforms in the first place. In order to ensure that the companies implement the law, so-called coordinators for digital services—in Germany, this is the Federal Network Agency—are responsible for monitoring compliance.

The DSA places tasks in the hands of tech companies that actually belong in the hands of the judiciary, criticizes criminal law expert Rinceanu. “These private companies are increasingly acting as gatekeepers at the threshold of human rights by controlling the public narrative,” explains the expert. And she continues: “Digital service providers are thus being pushed into the role of a private parallel justice system”. This poses a concrete threat to freedom of expression and democracy as a whole.

Another point of criticism is that the focus of regulation is almost exclusively on restricting problematic online content. Hardly any attention is paid to the phenomena of mass surveillance and privatized state censorship, both of which are gaining momentum. “We are leaving it up to private companies to decide which content is deleted or not,” is the worrying conclusion.

Johanna Rinceanu held the lecture “Meinungsfreiheit in der digitalen Welt?” [Freedom of expression in the digital world?] on May 13, 2025 as part of the series “Die Verfassung der Freiheit – Demokratieprobleme der Gegenwart” [The constitution of freedom – Contemporary problems of democracy] at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research. Listen to the entire lecture on Deutschlandfunk Nova (in German) here.