Amazon, systemic risk, and the Digital Services Act: What the General Court did and did not decide

Catalin Gabriel Stanescu, Associate Professor of Private Law at the University of Southern Denmark. His research focuses on consumer law, digital regulation, financial vulnerability, and the political economy of private law. Photo credit: David Dixon, via Wikimedia Commons The DSA Observatory recently published a thoughtful post on the General Court’s judgment in Amazon v Commission, which rejected Amazon’s argument that it should not have been listed as a ‘very large online platform’ (VLOP) under the Digital Services Act (DSA), and, in doing so, critiqued a working paper of mine on ‘systemic risk’ under the Digital Services Act. For me, it was a valuable engagement. The judgment does influence how arguments about systemic risk under the DSA can be framed. However, it does not support the broader claim that a financial-law analogy about the definition of ‘systemic risk’ has been displaced. When read carefully, Amazon takes a narrower approach: it rejects one specific application of…