This paper investigates the feasibility and potential role of using Large Language Models (LLMs) to support systemic risk audits under the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA). It examines how automated tools can enhance the work of DSA auditors and other ecosystem actors by enabling scalable, explainable, and legally grounded content analysis. An interdisciplinary expert workshop with twelve participants from legal, technical, and social science backgrounds explored prompting strategies for LLM-assisted auditing. Thematic analysis of the sessions identified key challenges and design considerations, including prompt engineering, model interpretability, legal alignment, and user empowerment. Findings highlight the potential of LLMs to improve annotation workflows and expand audit scale, while underscoring the continued importance of human oversight, iterative testing, and cross-disciplinary collaboration. This study offers practical insights for integrating AI tools into auditing processes and contributes to emerging methodologies for operationalizing systemic risk evaluations under the DSA.

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the ‘real’ world and substantially impacted the virtual world and thus the Internet ecosystem. It has caused a significant exogenous shock that offers a wealth of natural experiments and produced new data about broadband, clouds, and the Internet in times of crisis. In this chapter, we characterise and evaluate the evolving impact of the global COVID-19 crisis on traffic patterns and loads and the impact of those on Internet performance from multiple perspectives. While we place a particular focus on deriving insights into how we can better respond to crises and better plan for the post-COVID-19 ‘new normal’, we analyse the impact on and the responses by different actors of the Internet ecosystem across different jurisdictions. With a focus on the USA and Europe, we examine the responses of both public and private actors, with the latter including content and cloud providers, content delivery networks, and Internet service providers (ISPs). This chapter makes two contributions: first, we derive lessons learned for a future post-COVID-19 world to inform non-networking spheres and policy-making; second, the insights gained assist the networking community in better planning for the future.