Terms of Service Lint - EU Digital Services Act

Your terms-of-service file is a compliance document now. Since 17 February 2024 the EU Digital

For platforms and marketplaces with EU users: DSA fines reach 6% of global turnover. Services Act (Regulation (EU) 2022/2065) has applied to every provider of an intermediary or hosting service that offers it to users in the Union — not only the very large platforms. If people can upload, post, comment or message on the thing you built, the DSA puts named clauses in your terms and names the articles they come from.

Most terms files in a repository were written before that date, or were generated by a language model that produced fluent prose about "our community guidelines" and quietly skipped Art. 16. This extension reads the markdown you already have and tells you which article is missing.

What it does

Open a .md file, run DSA Terms Lint: Check this file, and every gap shows up in the Problems panel on the line it belongs to, each one carrying the article number and the sentence that is absent. It checks 18 rules drawn from the DSA's obligations on intermediary and hosting services:

• Art. 11 — single point of contact for Member State authorities, the Commission and the Board, and the languages you accept
• Art. 12 — a separate point of contact for users, reachable by a means that is not solely automated
• Art. 13 — a legal representative in a Member State, unless you state an establishment in the Union
• Art. 14 — the moderation policies, procedures, measures and tools; whether algorithmic decision-making is used and whether a human reviews it; plain, intelligible language; notice of significant changes
• Art. 16 — an electronic notice-and-action mechanism, and confirmation of receipt to the notifier
• Art. 17 — a statement of reasons for every removal, demotion, suspension or demonetisation
• Art. 20 — a free internal complaint-handling system, open for six months after the decision
• Art. 21 — the right to a certified out-of-court dispute settlement body
• Art. 23 — suspension, after a prior warning, for frequent manifestly illegal content and manifestly unfounded notices
• Art. 26 — ad labelling, who paid, and the main parameters (only when the file mentions advertising)
• Art. 28(2) — no advertising based on profiling where the service is open to minors
• Version date — terms dated before 17 February 2024, or carrying no date at all

Two rules are conditional: the advertising and minors rules stay quiet unless your own text raises those subjects, so a plain B2B tool is not nagged about things that do not apply to it.

How it reads

Rules are matched against a whitespace-flattened copy of the file, so a clause that is hard-wrapped across two lines still counts as present. A reference file that answers all eighteen returns zero findings; a typical 2023-vintage terms file in the same shape returns twelve, eight of them blocking.

Free and full

Free: a complete DSA gap list for the file you have open — every duty, every article number, nothing held back and nothing watermarked. That job finishes on its own.

Full version: scan every legal page and every language version in the workspace in one pass, and export a dated gap report with article citations that you can hand to counsel. https://buy.polar.sh/polar_cl_cvvpOHUl0trDgV1H4FITDdGO0eTfT4jX9Olem3MhKMp

Yardstick: EU technology counsel bills roughly $250–$500 an hour to read the same six pages.

Honest limits

This is a lint, not legal advice. It reads text and reports which duties are not expressed in it. It cannot tell you whether the notice-and-action form you linked actually works, whether your establishment statement is true, or whether a court would agree with your drafting. Use it to find the obvious gaps before someone else does.

Hub: https://getreadystack.com/tools/dsa-terms-lint