On June 18, the Luxembourg competition authority accepted a series of commitments from AliExpress aimed at addressing concerns regarding its transparency obligations to combat the spread of illegal content under the Digital Services Act (DSA). The authority highlighted AliExpress's failure to adequately assess and mitigate risks associated with the dissemination of illegal products.

The commitments made by AliExpress include making information and tools to limit the spread of illegal content easily accessible to users. These commitments specifically address the platform's systems for monitoring and detecting illegal products, the mechanism for reporting illegal items, the internal complaint handling system, transparency in advertising and recommendation systems, merchant traceability, and access for researchers to public data.

AliExpress will also implement a structured internal monitoring system for its commitments, overseen by a specialized team. Additionally, the platform will provide regular reports to an independent auditor, who will report annually to the competition authority.

Following a thorough investigation, the authority preliminarily concluded that AliExpress failed to meet its obligation to assess and mitigate risks related to the dissemination of illegal products under the DSA. This was attributed to the omission of risks related to limited resources for content moderation systems, ineffective enforcement of sanctions against illegal content publication, and systemic failures in moderation systems.

AliExpress now has the opportunity to defend itself by responding in writing to the authority's findings. If the preliminary opinion is confirmed, the authority may adopt an infringement decision against AliExpress.

The Digital Services Act (DSA) primarily aims to ensure a safe and responsible online environment, imposing specific rules on online intermediary services, with additional obligations for very large platforms that reach over 10% of the 450 million consumers in Europe.