States as platforms under new EU (online platforms’) law

The recent political agreement on the Digital Services Act (the “DSA”) means that, once officially released, it will formally introduce into EU law the term “online platforms”: These (according to the Commission’s original proposal, at least) are meant to be “a provider of a hosting service which, at the request of a recipient of the service, stores and disseminates to the public information” (art. 2, point (h) of the DSA), whereby a hosting service, in turn, “consists of the storage of information provided by, and at the request of, a recipient of the service” (point f). Therefore, between the DSA and the Digital Markets Act (the “DMA”), that has also been recently finalised, a comprehensive framework for the regulation of online platforms is introduced in EU law, the first of its kind both in Europe and internationally.

What if, however, this framework was applied to states themselves? What if states fell within the definition of an online platform within this context?