Overview
The obligation to submit statements of reasons applies to all providers of online platforms except those that qualify as micro or small enterprises, i.e. enterprises which employ fewer than 50 persons and whose annual turnover and/or annual balance sheet total does not exceed EUR 10 million.
Statements of reasons need to be submitted for each online platform, i.e. if a provider provides multiple online platforms, each online platform needs to be registered separately in the DSA Transparency Database.
To set up your statements of reasons submission process, you can:
• a) contact the Digital Service Coordinator of your Member State directly in order to commence the onboarding process. The current list of Digital Service Coordinators is available here.
• b) register on EU survey regarding your obligations under Article 24(5) of the Digital Services Act (DSA). After receiving your registration form, the Digital Service Coordinator of your Member State will contact you, providing the details on how to complete the onboarding of your online platform or online platforms.
Once you are onboarded via your Digital Service Coordinator, you will gain access to a sandbox environment to test your submissions to the DSA Transparency Database, which you can perform via either the webform or the API, according to your technical capabilities and/or the volume of your statements of reasons submissions.
More information on the webform submission is provided in the webform documentation.
More information on the API submission is provided in the API documentation.
Once the testing phase is completed, you will be able to move to the production environment of the DSA Transparency Database, where you can start submitting your statements of reasons.
If you provide multiple online platforms, the onboarding process has to be completed for each online platform.
Detailed steps
1. Creation of EU login accounts
You will need two separate EU Login accounts per online platform: one will be used in the sandbox environment and the other in the production environment. You can find an introduction to EU Login here.
Please note
a) You should supply at least two email addresses specifically for submitting statements of reasons (one for the sandbox environment and one for the production environment)
b) The email addresses associated with the EU login accounts, should not contain personal data. For instance, these could be:
• dsa_sors_sandbox@platformname.eu - for testing the statements of reasons submissions use in the sandbox environment
• dsa_sors_prod@platformname.eu - for submitting statements of reasons in the production environment
c) The email addresses used for submitting statements of reasons must be different for each environment
2. Onboarding by the relevant Digital Service Coordinator
Your Digital Service Coordinator will onboard your request into the system, following either the submission of the EU survey form or direct contact.
3. Testing of statement of reasons submissions in the sandbox environment
Once you receive the first email with instructions to start testing, you can log into the sandbox environment and start sending test statements of reasons.
4. Submitting statements of reasons to the production environment
Once the tests have been validated by the Commission, you will receive a second email with instructions to start submitting statements of reasons to the production environment of the DSA Transparency Database. You can then log in and start submitting statements of reasons to the production environment of the DSA Transparency Database.
