Where is Bluesky? Not here, say Irish, Dutch media regulators

As the European Commission tries to track down the EU headquarters of nascent social media platform Bluesky, it appears the X competitor has not based itself in Ireland, the European berth of many US tech giants, or the Netherlands.

The Irish media regulator Coimisiún na Meán told Euronews it has not been notified that the company is established in Ireland for the purposes of the Digital Services Act (DSA).

Ireland is home to 13 of the 25 Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) and search engines that are so far designated by the European Commission under the DSA, including Google, TikTok, Meta, as well as X, and is therefore often a logical choice for other tech companies to choose. 

The Dutch ACM, the authority in overseeing the DSA in the country, said it is not aware of any registration neither. Another social media VLOP, Snap, has its headquarters in the Netherlands. 

Earlier this week, a spokesperson for the European Commission said in a press briefing that Bluesky will need to register its EU headquarters to comply with the bloc’s online platform rules.

“All platforms in the EU […] have to have a dedicated page on their website where it says how many user numbers they have in the EU and where they are legally established. This is not the case for Bluesky as of today,” the spokesperson said.

Under the DSA, only the largest platforms with 45 million users per month in the EU, have to abide by the strictest rules, including transparency reports and risk assessments. DSA compliance of smaller platforms such as Bluesky will be guarded by national regulators. 

“As we are aware of this issue, we asked all coordinators on the national level if they can find any trace of Bluesky,” the Commission spokesperson said. 

Bluesky, which was founded as a research initiative as part of Twitter (now X) in 2019, is not close to reaching a VLOP status, as it said it has just some 20 million users globally, with audiences mostly in the US, Brazil and Japan.

The platform was an invite-only app until February of this year, but millions of users have joined it in the wake of the US presidential election, mostly steering away from X, owned by billionaire Elon Musk.

Bluesky did not reply to a request for a comment.