The European Commission’s Digital Services Act transparency database has been running hot this month. Across 9 to 15 August it took in an average of 36,844,958 statements of reasons a day, against 27,064,719 across 30 July to 3 August — a rise of 9,780,239 a day. Amazon Store supplied 9,441,002 of that increase, or 96.5 per cent. The next largest contributor, Facebook, added 248,570.
Amazon has filed 141,257,266 statements since 4 August, a third of everything the database received in those twelve days. Its daily submissions crossed ten million on eight of them and reached 17,507,274 on 10 August. In the whole of 2026 before this run, it had reached that level nine times.
The concentration is not itself new. Academic work on the database published in 2024 found it dominated by a small number of filers from its first year, and it has been so ever since: over the past week Google Shopping alone accounts for 46.3 per cent of all statements and Amazon Store for 34.8 per cent, so two services file 81.2 per cent of the European Union’s content-moderation ledger between them. At company rather than service level, Alphabet’s four submitting services come to 47.6 per cent and Alphabet plus Amazon to 82.4 per cent. What changed this month is not the shape of the database but Amazon’s share of it, and Google Shopping’s own volume barely moved — down 28,579 a day, or 0.17 per cent — so the shift in shares is a numerator story.
Amazon’s filing history makes any inference about moderation hazardous. The company’s daily submissions to the database run from 467 statements, on 2 June 2026, to 31,904,280 on 10 March, a range of more than 68,000-fold. For eight consecutive days from 27 May it filed fewer than 2,200 a day; on 4 June it filed 2,918,575. Volumes that move like that are describing an upload schedule at least as much as an enforcement posture, and the database records the moment a statement arrives, not the moment a decision was taken.
The Commission publishes the raw material for all of this — per-platform daily files, a dashboard, and pre-computed aggregates — and the arithmetic above is done across those files rather than on anything it withholds. What it does not publish is any explanation of movements. Its announcements page, which carries method changes affecting the data, contains no mention of Amazon. Amazon has made no announcement either.
Some caution is needed on the longer comparison. August 2026 is averaging 33,865,562 statements a day EU-wide, the highest monthly mean since May 2025 — but May 2025 is the last month before Google Shopping stopped submitting a large class of automated merchant decisions, a change the Commission documented at the time, so that comparison straddles a method break rather than spanning a continuous series. Against April this year, a month on the current basis, the August average is 2.15 times higher. The database itself is continuous: 1,056 consecutive daily files since 25 September 2023, with no gaps.