Online safety & content laws in Romania (2026)

EU Regulation 2022/2065 (Digital Services Act) applies directly in Romania to all categories of intermediary services as of 17 February 2024, imposing notice-and-action mechanisms, transparency reporting, and systemic-risk assessments for very large online platforms (VLOPs) and very large online search engines (VLOSEs).

Published in the Official Journal on 19 March 2024 and in force from 22 March 2024, Law 50/2024 designates ANCOM as the sole Digital Services Coordinator, establishes a provider-registration obligation (45-day notification to ANCOM), introduces a national sanctioning regime for DSA non-compliance, and authorises a supervisory fee on Romanian-established intermediary services providers from 1 January 2027.

ANCOM holds exclusive national competence to supervise and enforce the DSA for intermediary services established in Romania, acts as single point of contact to the European Commission and peer DSCs, and sits on the European Digital Services Board. ANCOM published its first DSA Annual Report covering 2024 activities.

Romania's Senate approved the 'Legea Majoratului Online' (L190/2025) on 6 October 2025; it now awaits final vote by the Chamber of Deputies. The law sets 'digital majority' at 16, requires verifiable parental consent for under-16s to access most online services, mandates age-appropriate design and content labelling, bans profiling-based advertising to minors, and authorises ANCOM to impose fines of 0.1–0.4% of annual turnover and, after five infringements, to suspend a provider's operations in Romania.

A separate draft law proposed in early 2025 targets VLOPs and would go beyond the DSA by requiring removal of illegal content within 15 minutes of publication, capping the spread of 'potentially harmful content' to 150 users, and imposing a 1% turnover fine where state-validated user reports exceed 30% of flagged content on a given platform. As of May 2026 this bill remains a legislative proposal.

Civil-society analysis by Expert Forum (2024) identified systemic gaps in Romania's early DSA enforcement, including limited investigative capacity at ANCOM and slow follow-through on systemic-risk oversight of VLOPs. These concerns have informed the subsequent push for stricter national supplementary legislation.