Group items tagged

The EU’s overall objectives are certainly well-intended. However, many concerns remain, for instance:

The DSA should tackle bad players and behaviours regardless of the platform’s size and country of origin. Having a specific regime for “very large online platforms” with additional obligations leaves the door open for rogue players to simply move to smaller digital service providers that are subject to a lighter regime.

To prevent legal uncertainty, the DSA should have a clear scope focusing on illegal content, products and services. The rules should be horizontal and principle-based, and could in a second phase be complemented with more targeted measures (legislative and non-legislative) to tackle specific concerns. 

o be as effective as the ECD, the DSA should be a horizontal principle-based legislative initiative, which could be complemented by targeted measures (legislative and non-legislative) tackling specific concerns. 

. 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.

The commercial importance of ISS providers is recognised in Recital 2 of the Directive which notes the significant employment opportunities and stimulation of economic growth and investment in innovation from the development of electronic commerce. The purpose of the exemption from monitoring is to make the provision of the service practicable and to facilitate the opportunities for commercial activity. The quantities of information described by the learned trial judge at paragraph [19] of his judgment explain why such a provision is considered necessary. Although the 2002 Regulations do not contain a corresponding provision they need to be interpreted with the monitoring provision in mind.

Given the quantities of information generated the legislative steer is that monitoring is not an option

he judge concluded that the existence of the XY litigation was itself sufficient to fix Facebook with actual knowledge of unlawful disclosure of information on Predators 2 or awareness of facts and circumstances from which it would have been apparent that the publication of the information constituted misuse of private information. In our view such a liability could only arise if Facebook was subject to a monitoring obligation

On 6 February 2020, the audiovisual regulator of the French-speaking community of Belgium (Conseil supérieur de l’audiovisuel – CSA) published a guidance note on the fight against certain forms of illegal Internet content, in particular hate speech

In the note, the CSA begins by summarising the current situation, highlighting the important role played by content-sharing platforms and their limited responsibility. It emphasises that some content can be harmful to young people in particular, whether they are the authors or victims of the content. It recognises that regulation, in its current form, is inappropriate and creates an imbalance between the regulation of online content-sharing platform operators, including social networks, and traditional players in the audiovisual sector

ould take its own legislative measures without waiting for work to start on an EU directive on the subject. 

At the heart of the initiative is a plan for online platforms to “increase the proactive prevention, detection and removal of illegal content inciting hatred, violence and terrorism online.” Significantly, the ideas are presented as “guidelines and principles”. That’s because they are entirely voluntary. Except that the Commission makes it quite clear that if this totally voluntary system is not implemented by companies like Facebook and Google, it will bring in new laws to make them do it on a not-so-voluntary basis. The Commission is quite eager to see swift results from these voluntary efforts, as legislative proposals could already be on the table by May 2018.

But the worst idea, and one that appears multiple times in the latest plans, is the routine and pervasive use of upload filters.

In doing so, they have caused notable collateral damage, especially to fundamental rights.

Beyond the potential negative economic aspects, several speakers at the Copycamp conference rang the alarm bells over the potential fallout of round-the-clock obligatory monitoring and filtering of user content on the net. Diego Naranjo from the European Digital Rights initiative (EDRi) reported: “I heard one of the EU member state representatives say, ‘Why do we use this (filtering system) only for copyright?’,” he said. The idea of bringing down the unauthorised publication of copyrighted material by algorithm was “a very powerful tool in the hands of government,” he warned.

In contrast to the dark picture presented by many activists on copyright, multi-purpose filtering machines and the end of ownership in the time of the internet of things, chances for reform are presented for various areas of rights protection.

EU copyright reform itself is a chance, argued Raegan MacDonalds from the Mozilla Foundation, calling it “the opportunity of a generation to bring copyright in line with the digital age, and we want to do that.” Yet the task, like in earlier copyright legislative processes, is to once more expose what she described as later dismantled myths of big rights holders, that any attempt to harmonise exceptions would kill their industry.

Non-Americans should not be satisfied with this state of affairs, which basically amounts to Americans fighting with other Americans about how to run the world.

that is, the idea that people should have a say in the rules that govern their activities. The Manila Principles, moreover, place an inordinate emphasis on domestic courts to regulate platforms, even though, as my co-author Keller notes, courts lack the expertise and policy-making capacity to do so.

What all of these proposals have in common, beyond adopting the American free-speech debate as their starting point, is that they treat these large platforms as an unalterable fact of life. They consider the main question to be not whether these platforms should be making decisions for billions of non-Americans, but how they should make these decisions.

A small group of companies with the largest online presence and high-risk features, which is likely to include Facebook, TikTok, Instagram and Twitter, will be in Category 1, while Category 2 services include platforms that host dating services or pornography and private messaging apps. The Government has said that less than 3% of UK businesses will fall within the scope of the legislation and the vast majority of companies that do will be Category 2 services, the UK government.

ursuing two reasonable-sounding goals for platform regulation

irst, they want platforms to abide by a “duty of care,” going beyond today’s notice-and-takedown based legal m

Second, they want to preserve existing immunitie