Poland’s Senate voted on August 6 to advance a law that would finally give the country functioning national machinery for enforcing the EU’s Digital Services Act — ending more than two years of regulatory paralysis that has left roughly 34 million Polish internet users without the platform-accountability protections available to citizens in most of the rest of the EU. The bill passed, but the Senate added an amendment that deserves scrutiny on its own terms: it places nominees of the president and both chambers of parliament on the advisory body that will sit alongside Poland’s new platform regulator — a design choice that puts Warsaw at odds with how the EU’s own digital regulation defines regulatory independence requirements.
The vote was not close. Ninety-one senators backed the amendment unanimously, and the full bill passed 59 votes in favor, with the remainder abstaining. The bill now returns to the Sejm, Poland’s lower house, which must decide whether to accept the Senate’s change. If the Sejm agrees, the final text goes to President Karol Nawrocki — the same official who vetoed an earlier version of this legislation in January 2026 over censorship concerns.
The European Commission formally referred Poland to the EU’s top court in May 2025 alongside four other member states for failing to designate or empower a functioning Digital Services Coordinator by the February 17, 2024 implementation deadline. Poland remained one of the last EU member states to establish the institutional machinery the DSA requires, and the Commission’s CJEU referral triggered the litigation phase of infringement proceedings.
The price of continued inaction, according to Secretary of State Paweł Olszewski of the Ministry of Digitalisation, who presented the bill in the Senate, was concrete: a €7 million (approximately $8.1 million USD) lump-sum fine, plus €50,000 (approximately $57,500 USD) per day of ongoing non-compliance. “Thanks to this law, Polish citizens will have the same rights as the majority of citizens in the European Union,” Olszewski told the August 6 Senate session.
A temporary government measure from May 2025 had designated the president of the Office of Electronic Communications (UKE) as acting Digital Services Coordinator, but legal scholars noted that the temporary UKE designation lacked the full legislative authority needed for effective enforcement.
What the Law Creates
The bill — project UC140, the first of two separate pieces of legislation the government submitted after the veto — focuses on the institutions, oversight mechanisms, and enforcement architecture of the DSA rather than on content-blocking procedures. That division is deliberate.
Under the law, UKE’s president becomes the formal Digital Services Coordinator, responsible for supervising platform compliance, handling user complaints, conducting proceedings against platforms that violate DSA rules, and cooperating with the European Commission and regulators in other EU member states. Partial competencies go to the president of UOKiK (Poland’s consumer protection authority) and the chair of KRRiT (the national broadcasting council).
The law also establishes the mechanisms that transform DSA from paper rules into practical tools. It creates a process for certifying trusted flaggers — organizations that can submit illegal-content notices to platforms on a priority basis, with platforms required to act on those notices without undue delay under DSA Article 22. It establishes the verified researcher pathway, allowing academics to gain access to platform data for systemic risk studies under the same regulation’s data-access provisions. And it creates a certification system for independent out-of-court dispute resolution bodies, giving users a recourse mechanism when platforms remove or restrict their content.
What the Senate Added: Why the Governance Twist Matters
The Sejm version of the bill had already assembled a broad advisory body — the National Council for Digital Services — to work alongside UKE. The council was to include representatives of the Commissioner for Human Rights, the Commissioner for Children’s Rights, the president of the Personal Data Protection Office (UODO), the president of UOKiK, and the chair of KRRiT, alongside members drawn from academia, civil society, and digital market organizations.
The Senate amended that composition. Under Article 15f, paragraph 5 as now passed, the council will additionally include a representative designated by the president of Poland, a representative designated by the Sejm, and a representative designated by the Senate.
That change received unanimous backing — all 91 senators who voted on the amendment supported it — and its proponents frame it as democratizing the council’s composition. A broader democratic footprint, the argument goes, makes the advisory body more representative.
The problem is structural. DSA Article 50 requires that Digital Services Coordinators — and the bodies that work alongside them — act with complete independence, remaining free from external influence whether direct or indirect, and specifically must not seek or take instructions from any government or any other public or private entity. The council is not the DSC itself; UKE holds that role and its formal independence is preserved. But advisory bodies that include presidential and parliamentary nominees hold a distinct institutional character from bodies composed of independent regulators, academics, and civil society.
Research published by the civil liberties group Liberties.eu in February 2025, examining DSC governance in six EU member states, found that insufficient safeguards had been introduced to restrict political interference and leadership appointments in DSCs across most of the countries studied. Germany — which took a different approach to its DSA advisory structure — populated its equivalent body with representatives from science, civil society, and business, explicitly keeping political nominees out.
The European Media Board, in a March 2026 statement about political interference in Slovakia’s media regulator, explicitly invoked DSA Article 50 independence requirements in connection with political appointments to bodies adjacent to digital regulators. Poland’s Senate amendment creates precisely the structural adjacency that statement flagged.
How It Got Here: A Brief Timeline
Poland’s DSA difficulties began long before the veto. The country failed to designate a functioning Digital Services Coordinator by the February 2024 deadline, triggering infringement proceedings. After years of negotiations between the government and civil society — led by the Panoptykon Foundation, a Polish digital-rights NGO — the implementing legislation passed parliament in December 2025.
On January 9, 2026, President Nawrocki vetoed the bill. His stated objection centered on an administrative content-blocking mechanism overseen by UKE — a government-supervised official rather than an independent court. The president argued this amounted to censorship.
Panoptykon and legal experts contested that characterization sharply. Panoptykon noted in its January 2026 veto response that the parliamentary process had added judicial oversight requirements, author participation rights in proceedings, and restrictions on the types of offenses that could trigger blocking — protections that made the mechanism, in their assessment, safe and beneficial for internet users fighting for free expression. Dorota Głowacka, a litigation expert at Panoptykon, told TechPolicy.Press in January 2026 that numerous safeguards had been added to the bill during parliamentary work. Katarzyna Szymielewicz, also of Panoptykon, warned in a January 2026 statement that without DSA enforcement, “Poland lacks effective appeal mechanisms against arbitrary content removals by platforms.”
It is worth noting that the January 2026 veto was Nawrocki’s second rejection of a major EU digital regulation implementation. In December 2025, he also vetoed Poland’s Crypto-Asset Market Act — the MiCA implementation — citing similar website-blocking concerns.
After the DSA veto, the Ministry of Digitalisation split the original legislation into two separate bills. The Council of Ministers approved both on June 2, 2026. The first — UC140, now before the Sejm for the Senate amendment decision — covers institutional and enforcement architecture. The second, still pending, covers the content-blocking procedure that was Nawrocki’s original objection.
Does Political Advice Compromise Political Independence?
The question Poland’s Senate amendment raises is not whether political nominees on an advisory council can be competent or well-intentioned. The question is whether their structural presence changes what the council is and how the DSC that relies on it can credibly claim to be insulated from political direction.
Consider what the Digital Services Coordinator will do with the council’s input: UKE will award trusted flagger status — determining which organizations get priority content-moderation access to platforms — and will certify out-of-court dispute resolution bodies. Both determinations shape who has structural leverage over platform content decisions in Poland. A council that includes a presidential nominee and nominees from both parliamentary chambers advising on these determinations is a council that embeds a form of political representation into what is meant to be an expert regulatory function.
No other EU member state implementing the DSA has constructed its advisory council with this design.
What the Absent Bill Still Decides
The current bill does not resolve Nawrocki’s stated objection. That is intentional: the content-blocking procedure — the mechanism through which a government-supervised official can direct platforms to restrict access to specific illegal content — is in the second, separate bill still to come.
That second bill, if and when it reaches Nawrocki, will contain the provisions he vetoed in January. His calculus may differ now — the EU fine is accruing, the infringement proceedings are active, and he has already signed legislation establishing UKE as Digital Services Coordinator in principle. But the harder fight is still ahead. The Senate’s political-nominees amendment on the first bill could be read as an effort to give Nawrocki and his political allies a foothold within the DSA enforcement architecture before the more contentious second bill arrives.
Once the law enters into force — 30 days after publication in Poland’s Journal of Laws — Polish internet users will gain formal access to complaint mechanisms against platforms, dispute resolution pathways, and the protection of a functioning trusted flagger system. That access has been delayed for more than two years. Whether the oversight council that shapes how those mechanisms function should include nominees answerable to political offices is a question that the EU, civil society, and eventually the Commission may weigh in on.
Frequently Asked QuestionsWhat is a trusted flagger and why does it matter for Polish internet users?
A trusted flagger is an organization formally certified by a country’s Digital Services Coordinator to submit illegal-content notices to online platforms on a priority basis. Under DSA Article 22, platforms must process those notices before ordinary user reports, without undue delay. For Polish users, the significance is practical: once UKE begins certifying trusted flaggers, civil society organizations working on child safety, hate speech, terrorist content, or disinformation will have a formal, legally backed channel to get harmful content reviewed faster. Until UC140 becomes law, no trusted flaggers can be certified in Poland at all — because the legal framework to do so does not yet exist.
Why does the DSA require Digital Services Coordinators to be politically independent?
The DSA’s Article 50 independence requirement mirrors the logic behind independent central banks and data protection authorities: regulatory decisions about which content is illegal, which organizations get trusted flagger status, and which platforms face enforcement action can have profound effects on political speech and economic competition. If a regulator can be directed by the government of the day, enforcement becomes a political tool rather than a legal one. The EU mandates that Digital Services Coordinators be free from any external influence, whether direct or indirect, including from governments. Poland’s choice to include presidential and parliamentary nominees on the advisory council alongside the Digital Services Coordinator creates an institutional proximity to political direction that other member states have avoided.
What happens if Nawrocki vetoes the bill again?
A second veto of UC140 would deepen Poland’s legal exposure under EU infringement proceedings and allow the daily fine — currently accruing at approximately €50,000 (approximately $57,500 USD) per day — to continue. More significantly, it would also delay the second bill (covering content-blocking procedures) because that bill’s passage becomes harder to justify before the institutional framework is settled. Poland has no realistic path to DSA compliance without UC140 becoming law. Whether the Senate’s governance amendment — which gives the president a direct nominee on the advisory council — makes a Nawrocki signature more or less likely is the strategic open question.
When will Polish internet users actually gain DSA protections?
The law will enter into force 30 days after publication in Poland’s Journal of Laws. Before that can happen: the Sejm must accept or reject the Senate’s governance amendment, and President Nawrocki must sign the bill. If the Sejm rejects the amendment, a revised version must clear the Senate again before going to Nawrocki. No date for the Sejm vote has been announced. Poland’s deadline for DSA compliance passed more than two years ago; the timeline for full legal entry into force depends entirely on how quickly both chambers and the president act.