Four More Filings, One Longer Pattern
This week, X Internet Unlimited Company lodged High Court papers seeking judicial review of four separate decisions by Coimisiún na Meán, Ireland's media and online-safety regulator, according to the Irish Times (irishtimes.com). The commission said it was aware of the filings but had not yet seen the papers, so it declined to comment. The Irish Examiner separately reported that X has now lodged proceedings against the regulator roughly a dozen times since November 2025 (irishexaminer.com) — spanning an appeal of the Online Safety Code, challenges to Article 20 investigations, and reviews of individual complaint adjudications made under the EU Digital Services Act (DSA).
The immediate trigger for the regulatory scrutiny is not new. On November 12, 2025, Coimisiún na Meán opened a formal investigation into whether X's internal complaint-handling system breaches Article 20(1) and (3) of the DSA — the provision requiring platforms to let users appeal content-moderation decisions through an accessible, non-arbitrary process (cnam.ie). The regulator says the inquiry followed concerns from its own Platform Supervision Team, plus input from the NGO HateAid and at least one user complaint. If X is found to have breached Article 20, Coimisiún na Meán can impose a fine of up to 6% of the company's turnover, confirmed by the Circuit Court or High Court.
What X Is Actually Arguing
X's litigation strategy has two distinct threads. First, a jurisdictional one: in December 2025, Ms Justice Mary Rose Gearty granted Elon Musk and X Holdings Corp permission to challenge the investigation itself, on the basis that neither Musk nor the US holding company operates the platform in the EU — that role belongs to X Internet Unlimited Company, the Irish entity (irishtimes.com). Second, a procedural one: at a July 2, 2026 hearing, X's counsel accused the commission of "kicking the can down the road" by routing complaints to an internal "supervisory team" rather than issuing final decisions, calling the resulting limbo "undead" investigations that could be "reanimated" by an unnamed officer at any time.
Both arguments sit on top of a case X has already lost. In July 2025, Mr Justice Conleth Bradley dismissed X's core challenge to the Online Safety Code, ruling that the code's age-assurance rules for video platforms fall within the Audiovisual Media Services Directive and do not conflict with the DSA — the two regimes, he found, operate "in a complementary manner" (rte.ie). X was ordered to pay costs and has since been granted leave to appeal, but the underlying "regulatory overreach" theory has not held up in court.
Steelmanning the Regulator
The case for Coimisiún na Meán is stronger than X's public framing suggests. Article 20 exists precisely because platforms have historically treated content-moderation appeals as a black box; a regulator investigating whether X's appeal process is real, and not theater, is doing exactly what the DSA asked host-state regulators to do. Because X's EU operating entity is headquartered in Dublin, Ireland is the DSA's front-line enforcer for the platform across the entire bloc — its findings on Article 20 compliance will functionally set the standard for X's 27-member-state user base, not just Irish users. A regulator moving cautiously and building a defensible record before making findings that carry EU-wide weight is not obviously unreasonable.
Where the Balance Tips
That said, X's narrower procedural complaint has real teeth, even if its broader litigation pattern does not. A regulator that can indefinitely re-route a complaint to a "supervisory team" without a decision deadline creates exactly the kind of open-ended regulatory exposure that discourages investment in compliance infrastructure — a platform cannot build durable appeal systems against a moving, undated target. That is a legitimate design flaw in how the DSA's referral-based enforcement is being operated in Ireland, and it would be worth a statutory fix — a hard clock on individual complaint decisions — regardless of who is raising it.
But a dozen separate judicial reviews, filed after the foundational legal theory was already rejected in July 2025, reads less like a principled defense of due process and more like an attempt to raise the cost of enforcement past the point the regulator can sustain it. Coimisiún na Meán's legal costs hit €5.8 million in 2024 alone — up from €1.6 million in its first year of operation — with roughly half of that tied directly to defending against actions like X's (irishtimes.com). Every euro spent litigating a case whose central legal question has already been settled is a euro not spent supervising the dozens of other platforms operating under Ireland's DSA mandate.
The Fix Is Procedural, Not Punitive
The proportionate response isn't to wave through every fine a regulator proposes, nor to treat litigation volume itself as evidence of bad faith. It's to separate the two live issues cleanly: give Coimisiún na Meán a binding statutory deadline for individual complaint decisions, which would blunt X's legitimate "kicking the can" complaint without further litigation, while letting the settled legal question — whether the code and the Article 20 investigation are lawful — stay settled rather than relitigated case by case. A regulator forced to spend its budget on serial procedural challenges to a decided legal theory is a regulator with less capacity to do the substantive oversight the DSA actually requires.