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The troubled year of 2020 comes to an end (finally!) and 2021 is already on the prowl, ready to rock the digital world and to give the community of digital operators a lot to do.

The European Commission (EC) ends 2020 with the publication of two proposed regulations: the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Digital Market Act (DMA), which are as revolutionary as the already familiar General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was two years ago.

The objectives are clear: to protect consumers and their online rights, increase the responsibilities of digital service operators and enhance the growth and competitiveness of the single market. 

The DSA focuses on regulating the functioning of digital services in the European space and clarifies and adjusts the qualifications and responsibilities of the operators of these services, including registries and registrars of top-level domains, regarding the treatment of illegal content published online.

The main purpose of the DMA is to prevent large technological platforms (gatekeepers) from continuing to dominate the markets in which they operate, crushing or preventing the emergence of new companies and, thus, hampering competitiveness and technological innovation in the European space.

Still at the end of this year, the EC, in the context of the European Union's cybersecurity strategy for the next decade, presented its proposal to revise the NIS Directive, NIS 2, which is particularly impacting on the digital infrastructure sector and will increase the cybersecurity risk management and incident notification obligations applicable to all those who are qualified as operators of essential services, such as .PT.

In the field of information sharing (e.g., personal data) with the competent criminal investigation authorities, we can still expect, in 2021, a new regulation on eEvidence and the amendment to Regulation (EU) 2016/794 of the European Parliament and of the Council, which will reinforce Europol's powers to allow this agency to directly request private entities from different Member States to disclose relevant information (e.g., domain name ownership) in the context of an investigation. 

In addition, since digitization is on the agenda of the priorities of the Portuguese Presidency of the Council of the European Union in 2021 (PPUE 2021) and being one of the thematic agendas of the Portugal 2030 Strategy, we risk predicting (and forgive us a moment of futurology) that the legislative bustle not "only” will it come from Brussels, because here we are also committed to guaranteeing the digital transition in Portugal and the digital hegemony of the European Union.