Digital Services Act: Know Your Business Customer obligations must apply to intermediary services

85 organisations across Europe and further afield have sent a strong message to the European Commission, Parliament and Council that in a responsible and mature economy, businesses should not be able to operate and have access to the modern necessary infrastructure Europe has to offer without accurately identifying themselves.

Limiting KYBC obligations to the context of online marketplaces is a missed opportunity to address the broad range of illegal content and counterfeit, unsafe, non-compliant and substandard products online.

As the European Parliament stresses (see amendment 512, recital 39b (new)), the DSA represents a real opportunity to rectify a situation that allows bad actors to ignore Article 5 of the ECD with impunity. A business cannot go online without a domain name, without being hosted, or without advertisement or payment services. Intermediary service providers, having a direct relationship with the business, are therefore best placed to make sure that only businesses that are willing to comply with the law have access to their services.

This does not mean monitoring their business customers’ behaviour, but merely asking them to identify themselves and applying simple due diligence checks on the basis of publicly available data. Should the information provided prove to be manifestly wrong, or the intermediary be notified that the business customer isn’t who it claims to be, the intermediary service provider should stop providing services until the business customer remedies the situation.

Find the letter in full here.