The P2B Regulation: The 30-Day Notice Right Most Businesses Don't Know They Have

The P2B Regulation: The 30-Day Notice Right Most Businesses Don't Know They Have

Almost everyone fighting a platform ban reaches for the Digital Services Act first. That's a fair instinct. But if your account is a working part of a business — a shop, a monetised channel, an agency, a service you sell — there's a second instrument running quietly alongside the DSA that often gives you more to work with. It's the EU's Platform-to-Business Regulation, P2B for short.

The DSA is broadly about content and users. P2B is about something narrower and, for a business, more useful: the commercial relationship between a platform and the people who earn a living through it. That framing changes what the platform actually owes you when it pulls the plug.

Who counts as a "business user"

P2B protects "business users" of "online intermediation services." In plain terms, that's anyone offering goods or services to consumers through a platform as part of their trade or profession. A marketplace seller qualifies. So does a creator monetising content, a company running a commercial page, or a business buying ads. A purely personal account with no commercial purpose generally doesn't.

That line is the whole game. The instant your account is commercial, a layer of rights switches on that personal accounts never see.

The 30-day notice right

Here's the headline. When a platform decides to terminate its services to a business user, it generally has to give at least 30 days' notice before the termination takes effect, along with a statement of reasons.

Two exceptions matter. The notice period doesn't apply where termination is required by a legal or regulatory obligation, or where the business user has repeatedly broken the terms in a way the platform can actually demonstrate. So the carve-out is meant for genuine, documented, repeated violations, not a single automated flag.

And that's exactly why it bites so often. Most terminations are the opposite of documented and repeated: an automated decision, executed instantly, with no notice and no specific reason attached. When a platform kills a commercial account with zero notice and can't point to a persistent, provable breach, it has a P2B problem on its hands.

The statement of reasons, and your right to respond

P2B also requires that when a platform restricts, suspends, or terminates a business user, it provide a statement of reasons on a durable medium, before the action takes effect or at the latest when it does.

That's a far cry from the vague "you violated our standards" most accounts receive. A proper statement of reasons has to explain the decision well enough that you can actually contest it. And you have a right to respond, through the platform's internal complaint-handling system. If all you ever got was a generic notice with no facts in it, the platform has probably missed what P2B asks of it, and that gap becomes an argument in its own right.

Service and data have to come back

One provision gets overlooked constantly. If a platform suspends or terminates a business user and then reverses that decision, it has to restore the service without undue delay, including your access to the data you held before the action.

Anyone who's been "reinstated" only to find their audiences, catalog, history, or analytics wiped knows why this matters. Under P2B, restoration means your data comes back too, not just the login.

Complaint handling and mediation

Larger platforms have to run an internal complaint-handling system and name mediators willing to help settle disputes out of court. There's a carve-out worth knowing: the obligation to operate a formal internal complaint system doesn't fall on small enterprises (broadly, under 50 employees and under EUR 10 million in annual turnover). Even so, the substantive rights (notice, reasons, restoration) still shape what a business user can demand and what an attorney can cite.

How P2B works alongside the DSA and national law

The strongest challenges rarely lean on a single rule. They tend to combine three things: P2B for the commercial-relationship rights (notice, reasons, restoration), the DSA for transparency duties and access to an out-of-court dispute body, and national contract or commercial law, which may forbid ending a relationship without proper notice or imposing a significant imbalance on a commercial partner.

Which mix fits depends on your country of residence and the nature of your account, which is why assessing a case starts with the specifics rather than a template.

Find out whether P2B applies to you

If your account was commercial and the platform cut it off with no notice and no real explanation, P2B may give you more leverage than any appeal form will. Our free diagnostic takes under five minutes and works out whether your situation qualifies for these protections. If it does, we connect you with an independent partner attorney who can act on them.

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