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. In e-commerce in particular, market surveillance authorities have great difficulty tracing non-compliant products imported into the Union and identifying the responsible entity within their jurisdiction.

In its 2017 work programme 4 , the Commission announced an initiative to strengthen product compliance and enforcement Union harmonisation legislation on products, as part of the 'Goods Package'. The initiative is to address the increasing amount of non-compliant products on the Union market while offering incentives to boost regulatory compliance and ensuring fair and equal treatment that will benefit of businesses and citizens.

The development of e-commerce is also due to a great extent to the proliferation of information society service providers, normally through platforms and for remuneration, which offer intermediary services by storing third party content, but without exercising any control over such content, thus not acting on behalf of an economic operator. Removal of content regarding non-compliant products or where it is not feasible blocking access to non-compliant products offered through their services should be without prejudice to the rules laid down in Directive 2000/31/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council 55 . In particular, no general obligation should be imposed on service providers to monitor the information which they transmit or store, nor should a general obligation be imposed upon them to actively seek facts or circumstances indicating illegal activity. Furthermore, hosting service providers should not be held liable as long as they do not have actual knowledge of illegal activity or information and are not aware of the facts or circumstances from which the illegal activity or information is apparent.

In a six-month period from October 2017 to March 20178, 21m sexually explicit pictures, 3.5m graphically violent posts and 2.5m forms of hate speech were removed from its site. These figures help reveal some striking points.

As expected, the data indicates that the problem is getting worse.

For instance, between January and March it was estimated that for every 10,000 messages online, between 22 and 27 contained graphic violence, up from 16 to 19 in the previous three months.

“Institutional standards should not contain elements pushed in by lobbies, since they are detrimental to public interests. Of course lobbies have financial and political means to ignore or distort standards in their products, but they want more. T

86% of which was identified by our technology before it was reported to Facebook.

For hate speech, our technology still doesn’t work that well and so it needs to be checked by our review teams. We removed 2.5 million pieces of hate speech in Q1 2018 — 38% of which was flagged by our technology.

addition, in many areas — whether it’s spam, porn or fake accounts — we’re up against sophisticated adversaries who continually change tactics to circumvent our controls,

The explicit reference to human rights in its charter acknowledges that companies have a role in protecting and enforcing human rights.

This is consistent with efforts by the United Nations and other advocacy efforts to create standards on how businesses should be held accountable for human rights abuses. In light of Facebook’s entanglement in misinformation, scandals and election falsehoods, as well as genocide and incitement of violence, it seems particularly pertinent for the company.

To date, we have assigned such decision-making powers to states, many of which are accountable to their citizens. Facebook, on the other hand, is unaccountable to citizens in nations around the world, and a single individual (Mark Zuckerberg) holds majority decision-making power at the company.

he shift from product- and service-based to platform-based business creates a new set of platform governance implications — especially when these businesses rely upon shared infrastructure from a small, powerful group of technology providers (Figure 1).

The industries in which AI is deployed, and the primary use cases it serves, will naturally determine the types and degrees of risk, from health and physical safety to discrimination and human-rights violations. Just as disinformation and hate speech are known risks of social media platforms, fatal accidents are a known risk of automobiles and heavy machinery, whether they are operated by people or by machines. Bias and discrimination are potential risks of any automated system, but they are amplified and pronounced in technologies that learn, whether autonomously or by training, from existing data.

Business Model-Specific Implications

While AI tools still exist in a relative legal vacuum, this blog post explores: 1) the extent of protection granted to algorithms as trade secrets with exceptions of overriding public interest; 2) how the new generation of regulations on the EU and national levels attempt to provide algorithm transparency while preserving trade secrecy; and 3) why the latter development is not a futile endeavour. 

most complex algorithms dominating our lives (including those developed by Google and Facebook), are proprietary, i.e. shielded as trade secrets, while only a negligible minority of algorithms are open source. 

Article 2 of the EU Trade Secrets Directive

Entwurf für ein Gesetz zur Bekämpfung des Rechtsextremismus und der Hasskriminalität

oviders of commercial telemedia services and associated contributors and intermediaries will, in future, be subject to the same information obligations as telecommunications services. A new Article 15a TMG obliges them to disclose information about their users’ inventory data if requested by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, law enforcement or police authorities, the Militärische Abschirmdienst (Military Counterintelligence Service), the Bundesnachrichtendienst (Federal Intelligence Service) or customs authorities

To this end, they are required, at their own expense, to make arrangements for the disclosure of such information within their field of responsibility. Services with over 100 000 customers must also provide a secure electronic interface for this purpose.

Recognising the need for co-operation between States and private industry

need to protect legitimate interests

roper balance between the interests of law enforcement and respect for fundamental human rights

Accordingly, UPC was instructed to do everything that could possibly and reasonably be expected of it to block kino.to. Whether all reasonable measures were taken was to be reviewed only in a subsequent “enforcement process”

he Court identified a three-way conflict between:  a) copyright and related rights; b) the intermediary’s right to conduct a business; and c) the freedom of information of internet users. It repeated its Promusicae conclusion that where several fundamental rights are at stake, a fair balance must be struck between the requirements of all. The Court found that the injunctive order under consideration struck the right balance.

intermediaries must be careful not to infringe users’ freedom of information

Why? Because (a) everybody has to chip in the fight against piracy - that includes ISPs and IBPs - and (b) because ISPs and IBPs make profit from letting users access infringing sites, and can afford to cover such costs whereas right holders may not. As such, bearing the full costs of injunctions is no 'unbearable sacrifice' in the meaning of the CJEU's Telekabel jurisprudence. 

The unions had asked the ISP/IBPs to block and de-list four websites providing access to protected material via streaming and/or downloading: www.allostreaming.com, www.allowshowtv.com, www.allomovies.com and www.alloshare.com.

The claimants also applied for the costs of the injunctions to be covered by ISP/IBPs in their entirety because they were not in the position to sustain these measures financially.