DSA Article 11: Points of contact for Member States’ authorities, the Commission and the Board

What this article means in practice

Written by Engage Compliance. The text above is the article itself, reproduced from its official source and unchanged. Everything in this section is ours, and last read against the current text on 2026-09-07.

Article 11 is the single point of contact for authorities, and it is the article most often confused with Article 13. Every provider of intermediary services needs one, wherever it is established. It is an electronic communication channel, not a person in the EU, and having one does not satisfy the Article 13 legal representative requirement.

Who it binds

• All providers of intermediary services (Article 11(1)), whether or not they are established in the Union. Unlike Article 13, this one has no establishment test.
• It has no size threshold. Article 11 sits outside the very large online platform provisions and applies across the whole intermediary population.
• It is for communication with Member States' authorities, the Commission and the Board referred to in Article 61 (Article 11(1)). The user-facing channel is a different article.

What it makes somebody do

• You, the provider. Designate a single point of contact enabling direct electronic communication with Member States' authorities, the Commission and the Board (Article 11(1)).
• You, the provider. Make public the information needed to identify and communicate with it, keep it easily accessible and keep it up to date (Article 11(2)).
• You, the provider. State which official languages can be used, and that set has to include a language broadly understood by the largest possible number of Union citizens AND at least one official language of the Member State of your main establishment or where your legal representative is (Article 11(3)).

What it does not say

• It does not require a person or an establishment in the Union. Article 11 asks for a contact point reachable by electronic means, which a provider outside the EU can operate from outside it.
• It does not replace Article 13. A provider with no EU establishment needs both: the Article 11 point of contact for authorities and an Article 13 legal representative. Having one and not the other is a common and visible gap.
• It is not the user-facing contact point. Article 12 is the separate obligation to give recipients of the service a way to reach you.
• The language requirement in Article 11(3) is two requirements, not one. A provider naming only English has not met the second limb unless English is an official language of the relevant Member State.
• Publication under Article 11(2) is not satisfied by a contact form. The information has to identify the point of contact and be easily accessible.

How it sits beside the other mandates

• Article 11, Article 12 and Article 13 are three separate contact obligations and are routinely collapsed into one line in a terms page. Authorities under Article 11, users under Article 12, and a legal representative in the Union under Article 13 where you have no establishment there.
• Article 11(3) ties the language set to where your legal representative is established, so the Article 13 appointment has a consequence for what Article 11 has to say.
• A provider in scope here is often in scope of the Terrorist Content Online Regulation Article 17 as well, and that appointment runs to a one-hour clock that no contact point can absorb on its own.