Christopher BarrettThe EU has reached a provisional political agreement on the Digital Services Act (DSA), which will force tech companies including secondary ticketing operators to take greater responsibility for the content and goods that appear on their platforms.
The Act includes measures to ensure secondary ticketing marketplaces act responsibly. These are expected to include:
- Ticket touts will only be able to list tickets after providing essential information (“Know Your Business Customer” principle), which marketplaces must make efforts to verify
- Secondary marketplaces will also be obliged to conduct random checks for tickets sold illegally
- Measures designed to panic buyers, such as pop-ups claiming several people are viewing the same ticket, will be banned.
The move has been welcomed by the Face-value European Alliance for Ticketing (FEAT) which campaigns for fairer ticket resale. It was among 130 signatories on a joint statement calling for the DSA to include “effective and unambiguous rules” to tackle illegal secondary ticketing activities and rogue traders.
FEAT has spent two years engaging with the EU over the DSA. Its director Sam Shemtob said, “We cautiously welcome news of measures to be placed on secondary ticketing marketplaces to clean up the Wild West in which they have operated so far. The devil will be in the detail, but we hope the new requirements for vetting traders and publishing basic information about the seller will enable fans and event organisers to make informed decisions.”
The text of the DSA will need to be finalised at technical level, before both Parliament and Council give their formal approval. It will come into force 20 days after its publication in the EU Official Journal. Big Tech firms will then have four months to prepare for the rules, while companies with fewer than 45 million users will have 15 months or until 1 January 2024, whichever is later.