Every day, millions of Europeans use online platforms to order food, find a job, book a trip or sell something they no longer need. The platform connects a buyer with a seller, very often a local SME. The seller is responsible for the product it sells. The platform that facilitates the sale becomes liable if it learns of an illegal product or service and fails to act. Liability sits with the actor best placed to handle it.
The e-Commerce Directive set out this principle in 2000. The Digital Services Act (DSA) updated it in 2022 and gave platforms clear duties to act against illegal and unsafe content, products and services. Among the new obligations, online marketplaces must check who their sellers are before letting them sell, and carry out random checks against official lists of illegal products. Every platform must deal first with alerts from trusted flaggers. Platforms must explain their moderation decisions, publish regular transparency reports and let users challenge decisions through an independent out-of-court body.
Several EU initiatives, including the upcoming European Product Act, now risk reopening this balance. They would shift liability away from whoever controls the product or service.
1. Keep what works
✔ Each actor answers for what it controls. Platforms provide the infrastructure, trust tools and reach. Sellers remain responsible for their products. This keeps the system fair and workable for everyone involved.
✔ Everyone knows the rules. Businesses know what is expected of them and consumers know their rights. SMEs can sell across Europe without building 27 different compliance systems. That clarity builds trust: 68% of consumers feel confident about the safety of the products they buy.
2. Reopening liability would backfire
⚠ One fix can cause many problems. The same liability rules cover food delivery, mobility, recruitment, travel and second-hand platforms. Changing them to fix unsafe products on some marketplaces would hit all of these services.
Take a second-hand platform where people sell used clothes, toys or bikes to each other. The platform never touches these items, and each one is unique. Making it liable for every sale would mean checking millions of products one by one, which no platform can do. The likely result: higher fees, fewer platforms and fewer ways for Europeans to give their things a second life.
⚠ The wrong actors would pay. Making platforms liable for products they do not make or handle would not make those products safer. It would raise costs for European platforms and the SMEs that sell through them. It would tilt the market towards a handful of global players and leave European consumers with less choice.
3. Enforce the rules that exist
✖ The rules exist. Enforcement lags. Europe must stop the flood of unsafe products. The problem is uneven enforcement, not missing rules. Rogue operators misuse the marketplace model and authorities should target them.
✔ The fix is consistent enforcement. Authorities should apply the DSA and the General Product Safety Regulation evenly across all 27 Member States. Some countries were late to appoint their national DSA regulators, the Digital Services Coordinators. This slowed the DSA rollout. National and EU authorities need to work together more closely, and the upcoming review of the Consumer Protection Cooperation (CPC) Regulation is the chance to do so. This would protect consumers now and give every company the same rules in practice achieving a genuine level playing field.
⚠ Get the European Product Act right. The Act should build on the DSA, not undermine it. It should not force platforms to monitor every listing, which DSA explicitly bans. It should match each actor’s duties to its role. New tools like the Digital Product Passport should work in practice before any obligations depend on them.
Rules on paper protect no one, consistent enforcement does.
The European Commission, Member States and the European Parliament must put enforcement first and keep the liability framework intact. The European Product Act is the moment to get this right and deliver a true Single Market.
