Zero — The Number of DSA Transparency Reports Odysee Has Ever Filed

The EU Digital Services Act became binding for general hosting providers on 17 February 2024. Article 15 requires every hosting service that offers content to EU users to publish, at least once per year, a public machine-readable transparency report. The report must enumerate government takedown orders, user notices received, the platform's own moderation actions, automated-system error rates, and the human resources allocated to content moderation. The European Commission maintains a public DSA Transparency Database for these filings. Odysee has never filed one. Not in 2024. Not in 2025. Not in the partial 2026 cycle.

The absence is not a paperwork oversight. It is a structural consequence of the platform's self-description: Odysee operates with four employees and no Trust & Safety function. A transparency report that disclosed those numbers honestly — zero proactive removals, zero user-notice acknowledgements, zero moderators, zero algorithmic-error remediation — would self-incriminate the entire content-moderation thesis the platform is built on. So none has been filed. The Article 15 obligation is treated as if it did not apply.

What Article 15 Actually Requires

The DSA text (Regulation (EU) 2022/2065) is unambiguous. Article 15 is titled "Transparency reporting obligations for providers of intermediary services". It applies to every intermediary that offers services in the EU — micro and small enterprises are exempt from a subset (Article 15(2)) but Odysee, on its own marketing, does not qualify as micro: the platform claims approximately 12 million monthly visitors and a global creator base in the hundreds of thousands. The transparency report must include, at minimum:

• Government orders received under Articles 9 and 10, broken down by Member State and category of illegal content.
• User notices submitted under Article 16, including the median time-to-action and the proportion processed by automated means.
• The provider's own-initiative moderation actions, including the type of restriction (removal, demotion, demonetisation, account suspension) and the type of detection (automated, human flag, trusted-flagger).
• Complaints handled under Article 20, including the rate of reversal.
• Out-of-court dispute settlement bodies engaged under Article 21.
• Human resources allocated to content moderation broken down by language of expertise (Article 15(1)(c)).

None of these data points are optional. None of these data points have been published by Odysee.

Where the Filing Should Live, and Doesn't

The European Commission's DSA Transparency Database (transparency.dsa.ec.europa.eu) aggregates filings from every reporting platform. As of the date of this publication, a search for "Odysee", "LBRY", and "Forward Research" returns no filings under any of those entity names. The DSA Transparency Database also exposes, for each filing entity, a downloadable statements-of-reasons archive — a record of every moderation decision the platform has explained. The same null result applies there: no statements of reasons have been submitted under any Odysee-affiliated entity.

Compare this to platforms of similar or smaller scale. Rumble (FreedomCo Inc.) files. Bluesky (Bluesky PBLLC) files. Mastodon instance operators above the small-enterprise threshold file. Even crypto-adjacent platforms with a libertarian self-conception file the report and pad it with permissive disclosure. The transparency-report obligation has been treated as a routine compliance step across the entire EU-facing video-hosting market. Odysee's exception is unique.

The Constructive-Knowledge Problem

Article 16 of the DSA establishes a notice-and-action procedure. Once a hosting provider has actual knowledge of illegal content, it must act expeditiously to remove or disable access. Knowledge is established by a sufficiently substantiated notice from any person. We have served seventeen such notices on Odysee's support address since November 2025. The aggregate response is documented in our takedown-tests register: zero removals, zero acknowledgements, zero published Article 17 statements of reasons. The non-existence of a transparency report compounds the Article 16 failure: there is no platform-side documentation of what was received, what was decided, what was communicated.

For the platform's defence to operate, Odysee would need to argue either (a) that it has no EU users, (b) that it qualifies as a micro-enterprise, or (c) that some specific exemption applies. None of those is sustainable on the facts. The platform is accessible from every Member State without geo-blocking. Its own marketing claims tens of millions of monthly visitors. Its terms of service are published in multiple EU languages. The DSA applies; the platform has elected non-compliance.

Which Coordinator Should Act

Each Member State designates a Digital Services Coordinator (DSC) empowered to investigate DSA breaches and impose periodic penalty payments. Odysee has no declared EU establishment. In the absence of a designated representative under Article 13, jurisdiction can be claimed by any Member State where the platform offers services and where harm has occurred. Three DSCs have a substantial track record on hosting-provider enforcement:

• Coimisiún na Meán (Ireland) — DSC with the most experience handling video-on- demand and platform cases by virtue of Ireland hosting most of the EU's major platform incorporations. cnam.ie/report-harmful-or-illegal-content
• ARCOM (France) — DSC with statutory powers under both the DSA and the French Loi Avia / Loi contre la manipulation framework, of particular relevance to the French-language Covid-denial network we documented in May. arcom.fr/nous-signaler
• BNetzA (Germany) — DSC empowered to enforce §130 StGB (Volksverhetzung) takedowns that overlap with DSA Article 9 government orders, of particular relevance to the 1488 / David Lane neo-nazi content documented in our Lane 1488 network piece. bundesnetzagentur.de/DSA

The Penalty Structure

DSA Article 52 authorises Member-State DSCs to impose fines of up to 6% of annual worldwide turnover for systemic infringements. For platforms below the Very Large Online Platform threshold like Odysee, periodic penalty payments under Article 51 are the more proportionate tool: up to 5% of average daily worldwide turnover per day of non-compliance, accruing until the obligation is met. For a platform that has been non-compliant on Article 15 since February 2024, the theoretical accrued exposure is non-trivial; the practical question is which DSC moves first.

What Should Happen

The minimum viable response from Odysee would be to file a single transparency report — for any year, for any quarter, even backdated — disclosing the actual numbers, however small or however zero. The report would be self-incriminating; that is the point of transparency reports. Filing one would convert the current Article 15 breach into an Article 16 enforcement matter, which is more tractable for the platform than open-ended periodic penalties.

The minimum viable response from EU DSCs would be a coordinated Article 51 letter giving Odysee notice of non-compliance and a fixed remediation window. The Board for Digital Services has the authority to coordinate exactly this kind of cross-Member-State action against a non-established platform; the legal infrastructure is in place.

Live takedown-test status, regulator filing tracker, and the running tally of notices we've sent are on the takedown-tests page.