Editor
Kai T chevron_right
On 20 July the European Commission fined AliExpress 550 million euro, roughly RM2.6 billion, for breaching the Digital Services Act. The charge was not simply that counterfeit goods appeared on the platform. It was that AliExpress failed to properly assess and reduce the risk that illegal, unsafe or counterfeit products would spread through its marketplace in the first place.
That distinction carries the whole story. Under the DSA, a very large platform holds a standing duty to look for systemic risk inside its own marketplace and to act before the harm reaches a shopper. The Commission said AliExpress fell short of that duty in multiple ways and failed to take effective measures to reduce the risk. It is the largest DSA penalty issued so far, arriving months after Temu was fined 200 million euro over similar failings. AliExpress has until 20 October to submit an action plan.
Malaysian shoppers sit inside the same supply chain. Cross-border parcels from the same seller pools land here every day, and Mordor Intelligence puts the Malaysian e-commerce market at about USD13.7 billion this year, with electronics among the heaviest categories. The products are comparable. What differs is who is expected to catch the problem.
Malaysia’s newest platform law, the Online Safety Act 2025, came into force on 1 January 2026 and does shift regulators toward systemic duties rather than case-by-case takedowns. Its priority harms, however, are child sexual abuse material and content facilitating financial fraud. Counterfeit and unsafe goods are not at the centre of it.
Counterfeit enforcement sits instead with the Ministry of Domestic Trade and Cost of Living. KPDN monitors marketplaces, social platforms and websites for fake listings and can order advertisements pulled down, but its own guidance is explicit that officers act once the trademark owner files the complaint. The Consumer Protection (Electronic Trade Transactions) Regulations 2024 layer on disclosure duties for platforms and sellers, carrying fines of up to RM50,000 or three years in jail for an individual and up to RM100,000 for a company.
Set beside a 550 million euro penalty, the meaningful gap is not the size of the number. It is the trigger. Europe asks the platform to prove it went looking. Malaysia largely waits for someone to notice and complain. A large brand with a legal team can work that system. A small Malaysian seller whose product is being copied, or a shopper who bought a fake charger that failed after a fortnight, usually cannot.
The timing is awkward and also useful. MCMC is hosting its International Regulatory Conference in Kuala Lumpur on 21 and 22 July under the theme “Shaping the Next Digital Era: Regulation, Resilience and Trust”, with platform governance, content moderation and data privacy on the agenda. Malaysia is already sitting in the room where these standards are argued out, and it has its own AI governance work moving in parallel.
Nothing obliges Malaysia to copy Europe. The DSA is expensive to administer, and its critics argue it rewards compliance paperwork more than safer outcomes. But the AliExpress decision shows what a regulator can do when the law lets it put one question to a marketplace: what did you do before the fake reached the buyer? In Malaysia, that question still mostly gets asked afterwards.
Image(s) courtesy of V H and Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash.