A Regulator Accused of Not Regulating
Most fights over the EU's Digital Services Act (DSA) are about platforms doing too little. The case now before Ireland's High Court is the opposite: X is accusing Coimisiún na Meán, Ireland's media regulator, of doing too little deciding. On July 2-3, 2026, before Justice Cian Ferriter, X's counsel Neil Steen argued the regulator effectively converted live complaints into "undead" ones — parked, not ruled on, and liable to be "reanimated" later by an unnamed supervisory officer rather than resolved on the merits (Irish Times).
The underlying investigation, opened by Coimisiún na Meán on November 12, 2025, examines whether X breaches Article 20(1) and (3) of the DSA — the provision requiring platforms to give users an effective, accessible internal complaint-handling system to appeal content-moderation and account decisions (Coimisiún na Meán; EUR-Lex, Regulation 2022/2065). The probe was triggered partly by a complaint from the German NGO HateAid and a user report, and it sits inside a broader dispute over whether Elon Musk himself, not just X's Irish subsidiary, counts as a "provider" of the service in the EU — a jurisdictional fight with its own hearing track (Irish Times, June 9, 2026).
The Case for Coimisiún na Meán
Before siding with X, it's worth taking the regulator's position seriously. Article 20 exists because appeals mechanisms are the DSA's main lever for individual redress — without a working internal complaints system, a user wrongly banned or a victim of illegal content whose report is ignored has no meaningful recourse short of litigation. Investigating how a platform handles complaints, rather than any single decision, is inherently more complex than a one-off ruling: it requires sampling processes, testing notification practices, and assessing whether appeals are handled in a "timely, non-discriminatory, diligent and non-arbitrary manner," as Article 20 requires. Routing a technically complex question to a specialist supervisory team is a defensible way to get that analysis right rather than rushed. Digital Services Commissioner John Evans has framed the DSA's complaint-handling rules as central to "rebalancing the relationship between online platforms and their users" — a framing X's own conduct in this litigation has, if anything, reinforced: in March 2026, the High Court rejected X's bid for a stay and awarded costs against the company, with Justice Ferriter finding X's lawyers had overstated the harm from letting the investigation continue (RTE).
Where the Steelman Breaks Down
But there's a real difference between careful process and open-ended limbo, and X's complaint is narrower than "stop investigating us" — it's "tell us what stage this is at." A regulator that can indefinitely re-route a complaint to an unspecified internal team, without notifying the subject of the investigation or setting a horizon for resolution, creates exactly the kind of regulatory uncertainty that the DSA's procedural safeguards were meant to prevent on the platform side. The DSA imposes strict timelines and due-process obligations on platforms precisely because open-ended discretion invites abuse; a regulator invoking the same discretion against a platform, with no comparable check, should draw scrutiny for the same reason. If Coimisiún na Meán's practice — parking complaints without a determination, reachable again later without notice — became standard, it would hand every Digital Services Coordinator in the EU a tool to keep a company under perpetual investigatory threat without ever having to make a finding that could itself be appealed. That is bad for regulatory legitimacy as well as for business certainty, and it's a criticism the regulator would do well to answer with a clearer internal procedure rather than dismiss as obstruction.
The Stakes Are Real, Even If the Politics Are Noisy
It is easy to read this dispute purely through the lens of Musk-versus-regulator theatre, especially layered onto the separate "decisive influence" jurisdictional fight over whether Musk personally is a covered "provider." That framing undersells what's actually being litigated: a potential fine of up to 6% of the turnover of whichever entity is found culpable is a serious enforcement tool, and how it gets triggered — by a clean ruling versus an indefinite internal referral — matters for every platform operating in the EU, not just X (Irish Times, June 9, 2026).
What Proportionate Regulation Would Look Like
The DSA's complaint-handling rules are a legitimate and, on balance, sensible check on platform power — users should be able to appeal takedown and suspension decisions without going to court. But that legitimacy depends on regulators being bound by the same procedural clarity they impose on platforms. Coimisiún na Meán does not need to drop the X investigation to win this argument; it needs a public, time-bound process for internal referrals so that "further review" cannot function as an indefinite stay of judgment. If Justice Ferriter's ruling forces that clarity, it will strengthen the DSA's credibility — for X and every other platform the regulator investigates next.