A Regulator That Asked For Rules Instead of Writing Them
On July 17, 2026, ARCOM — France's audiovisual and digital regulator and the country's Digital Services Act coordinator — published an assessment of the ad-transparency repositories that Article 39 of the DSA requires from very large online platforms. The report is notable less for what it found than for what ARCOM did with the finding: rather than open enforcement proceedings against TikTok, Meta, X, Google, YouTube or Amazon, it filed a formal memorandum asking the European Commission to issue harmonizing guidelines. That's the right instinct, and it's worth explaining why.
What the audit actually found
Article 39 requires every very large online platform and search engine — those with more than 45 million average monthly EU users — to keep a public, searchable repository of every ad they've shown, including who paid for it, how it was targeted, and how many people it reached, for the duration it ran plus one year afterward. ARCOM's report examined the seven registries maintained by TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, X, Google, YouTube and Amazon and concluded the legal obligation was met in form but not in function.
Per ARCOM's press release, access to several registries "requires creating an account, filling out a detailed form, or even obtaining prior authorization" before a journalist or researcher can see anything. Search tools return results of "limited relevance," filters "cannot be combined," and tracing every ad from a single advertiser "often requires knowing a technical identifier" ordinary users don't have. Each platform formats its data differently — ARCOM compared it to "each supermarket displaying its prices in a different unit." APIs meant to support large-scale analysis suffer from query limits, thin documentation, and instability that interrupts ongoing research.
None of this is a claim that platforms are violating Article 39's letter. It's a claim that "searchable and reliable" and "multicriteria" are under-specified in practice — and that seven platforms have filled that gap seven different ways.
The steelman for tougher, faster action
There's a real case for wanting ARCOM to go further and faster. Ad-transparency registers exist so outside researchers, journalists and civil-society groups can catch problems platforms have no incentive to surface themselves — coordinated political spending, foreign-funded campaigns, discriminatory targeting. A repository that takes a subject-matter expert an afternoon to navigate isn't doing that job for a freelance reporter on deadline or a small NGO without a data team. France, one of the DSA's more active national coordinators, has domestic political tailwind for moving fast: the under-15 social-media ban now clearing a parliamentary reconciliation committee, which Reuters reports Macron wants in force before the September school term, shows Paris is willing to legislate ahead of Brussels when it chooses to. A regulator that has already documented compliance gaps could reasonably use its own enforcement powers now instead of waiting on the Commission's calendar.
Why the referral to Brussels is still the better call
That case is real, but it points the wrong direction. The DSA was built specifically to prevent the pre-GDPR pattern where national regulators developed incompatible readings of the same obligation, forcing platforms to build separate compliance stacks per member state — a tax that lands hardest on smaller entrants and barely dents incumbents who can absorb it. ARCOM's own report is itself evidence of the problem it's flagging: inconsistency across platforms within one obligation is exactly what harmonized, Commission-level technical guidance is meant to resolve, not what 27 separate national enforcement actions would fix. If Paris fines TikTok over a UI choice its regulator dislikes while Dublin or Berlin reach different conclusions about the same repository, platforms are left guessing which national interpretation controls — and the researchers the registers exist for gain nothing.
ARCOM asking the Commission to specify access conditions, mandatory search functions, documentation standards and data formats is harmonization working as designed. It also keeps the remedy proportionate to the finding: this is a usability failure, not evidence of concealment, and the fix is standardization, not punishment.
What to watch
The Commission hasn't committed to a timeline for the guidelines ARCOM requested. Two things are worth tracking. First, whether Brussels treats this as one input among several DSA coordinators are likely to raise — Ireland's Coimisiún na Meán and Germany's counterpart oversee the same seven platforms and may reach parallel findings — or moves it to the front of the queue. Second, whether any guidelines that emerge stay genuinely technical (API specs, minimum filter sets) or drift into dictating design choices better left to the platforms, which would recreate the fragmentation problem at the EU level instead of the national one.
"Access conditions that are sometimes complex, uneven search functionality... insufficient completeness or readability of data." — ARCOM, July 17, 2026
Regulators are often criticized for either doing nothing or overreaching. ARCOM's ad-registry report is a case of a coordinator identifying a real gap, documenting it specifically, and routing the fix to the level of government actually equipped to close it uniformly. That's the model worth encouraging — not because platforms deserve the benefit of the doubt, but because the alternative is 27 versions of the same complaint.