The questionnaire matters more than the euro figure. Of the nine questions Warsaw put to Meta on 18 August, two ask for operational measurements rather than policy statements: how the company verifies advertisers, and how long it takes to remove an ad once it has been reported [3]. A seven-day deadline was attached [3], which makes both a reply and a silence usable. Deputy minister Dariusz Standerski had already said in public that the next letter would go to Brussels if the answers did not satisfy [4], so the questions were written in the knowledge that they would be read by the only body that can impose a penalty [5].
The number reads as a bid rather than a punishment. The Commission's visible reference point is the €120M levied on X last year over transparency obligations [8], and Poland has asked for roughly 2.1 times that [19]. The statutory ceiling is 6% of global annual turnover, which for Meta runs to several billion euros [6]; on that basis the request is at most about a tenth of what the instrument permits [21], and every DSA fine so far has sat in the low hundreds of millions [7]. Warsaw picked a figure inside the observed range. Whether Brussels acts on it is a separate matter: it sets its own priorities and, on TNW's reading, has not been quick to conclude the Meta cases it already has open [9], alongside consumer-group complaints over financial scam advertising against Meta, TikTok and Google filed in May [17] and separate proceedings on addictive design and child protection [18].
The part that changes arithmetic is the March judgment. The Warsaw Court of Appeal, hearing a case brought by Rafal Brzoska and Omenaa Mensah, refused Meta the DSA's hosting liability shield [13], holding that a company that "receives remuneration and offers advertisers support and tools (algorithms)" is an active participant in the advertising and therefore outside Articles 6 and 7 [14]. Meta ran the usual argument, that it hosts what advertisers submit, and the court declined to treat a seller of targeting tools taking a share of the spend as a bystander [22]. Read together with the questionnaire, that is why removal latency is the metric to watch: if the platform is a participant in the ad, the interval between report and takedown is no longer an internal service level, it is the period during which the platform was publishing something it can be sued over. Advertiser verification is the same logic one step earlier, at the point where money changed hands.
The politics that produced this are personal rather than doctrinal. Fraudulent investment ads have used Brzoska's manipulated likeness for years, including a false claim that he had died which reached his own children [10], and Meta suspended his Instagram account after he criticised the ads publicly [11]. Gawkowski called that "censorship in its darkest form" [12]. Ministers do not usually name a fine in public over an abstraction, and platforms that sell placement in the EU should expect the next such letter to arrive with a deadline and a request for two numbers they may not currently publish.
