On May 19, 2026, Arcom President Martin Ajdari presented the French regulator's 2026-2028 strategic project at the authority's Paris headquarters. The headline pledge: a 'faster, more directive and more effective' implementation of the Digital Services Act (DSA) against the very large online platforms operating in France — X, TikTok, Meta, and Snapchat among them. Ajdari structured the plan around three axes and twelve objectives, with platform supervision now the single fastest-growing line item inside Arcom.
The ambition is not modest. Arcom intends to roughly double the size of its online-platforms unit over three years, and Ajdari has asked the government for around thirty additional full-time positions between 2026 and 2028 on top of its current 378-FTE cap and roughly €50 million annual budget. Priorities include algorithmic transparency, child protection (including verification work tied to France's planned digital-majority regime), political-ad transparency under Article 39 of the DSA, and stronger compliance with the researcher data-access obligations in Article 40.
The Steelman: Why Aggressive Enforcement Has a Real Case
The regulator's case is not hand-waving. In December 2025, the European Commission fined X €120 million for breaching Article 40.12 of the DSA — the first such monetary penalty under the regulation — citing 'overly restrictive' eligibility criteria for researchers, inadequate vetting processes, and excessively limited data quotas. The Commission separately issued preliminary findings against TikTok, Facebook and Instagram on similar data-access deficiencies and, in Meta's case, on opaque content-reporting and appeals flows. Arcom 'saluted' those findings.
If one accepts the DSA's premise — that systemic risks on the largest platforms cannot be evaluated without independent inspection of ranking systems, ad libraries and moderation outcomes — then the platforms themselves have spent two years vindicating the regulators. Ad repositories that are not actually searchable defeat the purpose of Article 39; researcher portals that filter out non-EU academics, scrub edge-case methodologies, or cap data volumes below useful thresholds make Article 40 a paper right. Ajdari is, in that frame, simply asking for the resources to do the job the EU legislator already assigned to him.
Where Speed Cuts Against Proportionality
Still, 'faster and more directive' is a slogan, not a standard. Three risks deserve attention.
First, the directive instinct can outrun the evidence base. Algorithmic transparency obligations only produce useful oversight when regulators know what they are looking for. Pushing platforms to ship dashboards, repositories and feeds on short timelines — without a clear theory of which signals actually correlate with systemic risk — invites compliance theatre. The Commission's own X decision implicitly acknowledged this by listing three distinct types of access failure rather than a single legal standard. A faster enforcement cadence at the Member State level risks ossifying interpretive choices before the case law settles.
Second, child-protection priorities are colliding with adult speech. Arcom reports that pornography-access blocks have cut consumption 'by almost half,' and the agency is now preparing to operationalise France's digital-majority law (a proposed ban on under-15s holding social-media accounts is moving toward a September 2026 target). The age-verification stack required to deliver this — even when designed around double-blind architectures — has well-documented chilling effects on adults whose lawful speech now depends on producing identity tokens before posting. Proportionality is not a vibe: it requires Arcom to show that less-restrictive means were tested first.
Third, the political-advertising priority lands in the middle of an electoral cycle. France will hold its 2027 presidential election under the new regime, and Ajdari explicitly framed political-ad transparency under Article 39 as a campaign-integrity tool. That is reasonable on its face — voters benefit from knowing who paid for what. But Article 39 also covers organic political communication that platforms have classified as 'commercial' for various reasons, and the line between regulated electioneering and ordinary policy speech is exactly where over-enforcement chills legitimate debate. A 'directive' regulator entering this terrain in an election year should publish, in advance, the rules it will apply.
The Resource Argument Cuts Both Ways
Ajdari is candid that Arcom is under-resourced: 'Our current budget, not least our resources, are not sufficient enough to ensure what we perceive of the expectations of both Parliament and citizens.' Coupled with the projected collapse of traditional-media advertising share — from over 50% in 2019 to roughly 20% by 2030 — the agency is simultaneously absorbing platform supervision, AI oversight, and a shrinking domestic audiovisual sector.
The innovation-friendly reading is that under-resourced regulators reach for blunt tools. When you have neither the headcount nor the technical depth to audit a recommender system properly, the temptation is to demand take-downs, deadlines and prescriptive interface mandates instead — moves that are easy to enforce and hard to calibrate. France would be better served by an Arcom that is well-funded enough to be patient and analytical than one stretched thin enough to be reactive and absolutist.
What 'Effective' Should Mean
The useful version of Ajdari's pledge would translate 'faster' into shorter time-to-clarity for platforms — public guidance on Article 39 ad-repository specs, published benchmarks for Article 40 researcher access, transparent reasoning when Arcom escalates a case to the Commission. It would translate 'more directive' into proportionality reviews published alongside enforcement actions. And it would translate 'more effective' into measurable outcomes: how many vetted researchers actually received data, how many political ads were correctly archived, how many under-15s were protected without driving them onto unregulated services.
The DSA is a serious regulation. France is right to take it seriously. But seriousness in 2026 looks like institutional patience, not institutional speed.