On 14 October 2026 the EU General Court dismissed Technius's challenge to the designation of its adult platform Stripchat as a Very Large Online Platform under the Digital Services Act (Case T-134/24). The judgment is legally unremarkable in its outcome. Its reasoning matters more: it confirms that the Commission can overrule a provider's own audience figures, even though the law that sets the 45 million threshold does not say how to count users.
What the Court decided
The DSA applies its heaviest obligations to platforms with 45 million or more average monthly active recipients in the EU, a threshold the Commission's DSA overview describes as covering the biggest platforms. Technius reported figures of roughly 31 to 32 million, based on SimilarWeb data adjusted for "bounced" visits. The Commission found the real number exceeded 62 million, according to IPWatchdog's account of the Court's press release. Per the Commission's list of designated services, the designation is dated 20 December 2023.
According to Matheson's analysis, the Court held three things that matter beyond this one platform:
- No specific counting methodology is required by law, so the Commission may reject a provider's figures if it gives sufficient reasons.
- The Commission could disregard Technius's 49% bounce-rate adjustment, and did not have to clean the data itself.
- A later recalculation, to about 37.3 million for the contested period, has no retroactive effect. Legality is judged on the information available when the decision was taken.
The case for the Court's reading
The strongest argument for the Commission is practical. Providers know their traffic best and have every incentive to shade it downward. If a self-reported or third-party-adjusted number bound the regulator, the threshold would become a voluntary opt-in. A platform could pick the analytics vendor and the filtering assumptions that keep it under the line. Requiring regulators to accept any plausible methodology would invite exactly that gaming. The retroactivity point is also sound in general administrative law: a decision is reviewed on the record before the decision-maker, not on evidence generated after the fact.
The Court also did not find the process unfair. The 10-working-day window to respond to preliminary findings did not breach the right to be heard, and the absence of a statutory method did not breach legal certainty, per the Matheson summary.
Where the reasoning leaves a gap
The difficulty is what the judgment implicitly concedes. The two sides' numbers were not close: about 31 to 32 million against more than 62 million, and later 37.3 million after the vendor revised its own methodology. A threshold that can yield results spanning both sides of the line, depending on who counts and how, is not a bright line. It is a judgment call that the Commission is entitled to make with limited constraint.
That matters for a pro-innovation reading of the DSA. Designation brings risk assessments, audits, data access obligations and supervisory fees. Providers near the line cannot know in advance which side they will land on. The Commission's own list shows how consequential the status is: 29 services from 24 providers are currently designated. Yet Stripchat's designation was later terminated, with the Commission adopting a decision on 27 May 2025 ending it, according to that same list. A status that can be imposed on a contested count and later withdrawn is evidence that the underlying measurement is unstable.
The Court noted that no delegated act setting a methodology has been adopted. That is the real finding. The legislature gave the Commission the power to specify counting rules and, so far, the Commission has not used it. It has therefore kept discretion that a published method would have narrowed.
What the Commission should do next
Proportionate regulation needs predictable triggers. Three steps follow from the judgment:
- Adopt the methodology. A delegated act defining how to count active recipients, including how to treat bounced visits, logged-out users and bots, would convert case-by-case argument into a rule providers can plan around.
- Publish the Commission's own calculation. When it overrides a provider's figure, the method and data sources should be reasoned in a form that others can test and replicate.
- Build in a prospective path. Retroactivity was properly denied, but a provider with credible new data should be able to ask for a forward-looking reassessment through a clear procedure rather than litigation.
None of this weakens enforcement. Legal certainty makes enforcement more durable, because decisions grounded in a published method are harder to challenge and easier for smaller firms to accept. A judgment that says the Commission may decide without a fixed method is a reason for the Commission to supply one voluntarily, not a reason to rely on the absence.
The wider pattern
The ruling came alongside an Advocate General opinion on TikTok's gatekeeper designation under the Digital Markets Act, which IPWatchdog reports also favoured the Commission. Taken together, the signal from Luxembourg is that EU courts will give the Commission wide room on designation. Companies should therefore expect to win few threshold challenges on methodology and should focus on engagement before the decision is made. Whether that is healthy depends on whether the Commission treats the room as an invitation to build clearer standards or as a permanent grant of discretion. The Technius judgment can be appealed on points of law, but the odds look long.
For now, the lesson for platforms near 45 million users is plain: count conservatively, document the method, and assume the regulator will test it.