A Fight Over Process, Not Substance — Yet
On July 2, 2026, lawyers for X told the Irish High Court that Coimisiún na Meán, Ireland's media regulator, has been "kicking the can down the road" on a Digital Services Act (DSA) investigation opened against the platform in November 2025. Counsel for X, Neil Steen, argued the regulator's decision to hand complaint information to an internal "supervisory" team — rather than issue a definitive finding — turns live complaints into what he called "undead" cases, held in reserve for an unnamed officer to "reanimate" later (Irish Times, July 2, 2026). Notably, this is not yet a fight about whether X broke the law. It's a fight about how long a platform can be left in regulatory limbo before that limbo becomes its own kind of harm.
What the Underlying Investigation Is About
Coimisiún na Meán opened its investigation into X on November 12, 2025, triggered by concerns from its own Platform Supervision Team, a complaint from the NGO HateAid, and a separate user complaint. The inquiry concerns Article 20 of the DSA, which requires large platforms to run an internal complaint-handling system that lets users contest content removals, account suspensions, and terminations in a "timely, non-discriminatory, diligent and non-arbitrary manner." Digital Services Commissioner John Evans framed the stakes bluntly: "The right to appeal a decision is an essential right and a cornerstone of the DSA," adding the regulator will "not hesitate to intervene" (Coimisiún na Meán, Nov. 12, 2025). As Ireland's designated Digital Services Coordinator since February 2024, Coimisiún na Meán is the lead EU enforcer for X's compliance across the bloc (Coimisiún na Meán, DSA role page).
The Regulator's Case for Caution
There's a legitimate reason regulators build in a supervisory referral step before opening formal proceedings. X is a very large online platform under the DSA, with roughly 45 million monthly active EU users, and a formal investigation exposes it to fines of up to 6% of global turnover — double the GDPR's 2% ceiling (Irish Times, June 9, 2026). Given that exposure, a regulator that rushes to a formal finding on a thin evidentiary base invites exactly the kind of legal challenge X is now mounting. Routing complaints through an internal team to build a proper record before triggering a high-stakes process is a defensible, arguably prudent, use of administrative discretion — and Coimisiún na Meán's counsel, David Fennelly, argued as much, citing the public interest in an orderly complaints process under the DSA (Irish Times, July 2, 2026).
Where the Delay Argument Has Teeth
But X's complaint points to a genuine structural weakness in how the DSA's enforcement machinery operates in practice. A regulator that publicly announces "we have opened an investigation" — as Coimisiún na Meán did in November — but then parks the complaint with an internal team indefinitely, gets the reputational benefit of looking tough on a marquee platform without the procedural discipline of a formal timeline, a defined decision point, or a clear appeal right for the company under investigation. Steen's objection that the commission made "no pre-decision notifications" goes to a real fair-procedures principle in Irish and EU administrative law: parties facing consequential regulatory action are generally entitled to know where they stand and to respond to a defined case, not an open-ended one. For a company already carrying "under investigation by an EU regulator" as a market and reputational fact since November 2025, eight months without a formal decision — while facing the largest financial penalty ceiling in EU platform law — is a legitimate grievance regardless of the substance of the Article 20 complaint itself.
The Broader Stakes for Enforcement Credibility
The courts have so far been unpersuaded that this amounts to irreparable harm. X was refused a stay against Coimisiún na Meán's use of complaint information and was ordered to pay costs after that failed application, with the judge finding X had "overstated the extent to which the platform would be prejudiced" and underweighted the public interest in an orderly DSA complaints process (RTÉ, March 27, 2026). X had earlier won leave for judicial review and a temporary stay from Ms Justice Mary Rose Gearty in December 2025, before that stay was allowed to lapse (Irish Times, Dec. 9, 2025).
The substantive answer to X's claim matters beyond this one case. Ireland hosts the EU headquarters of most major platforms and, as DSC, Coimisiún na Meán's enforcement choices will be read as a template by other national regulators and by the platforms themselves. If "supervisory referral" becomes a routine way to sit on politically sensitive complaints without a clock running, that undermines the predictability platforms need to actually comply — and gives every future regulatory target a genuine argument, not just a rhetorical one, that DSA enforcement can be wielded as reputational pressure rather than a bounded legal process. Coimisiún na Meán doesn't need to drop its Article 20 concerns to fix this; it needs a published timeline for supervisory referrals so "under review" has an end date. Regulators earn deference by moving deliberately, not by moving without a deadline.