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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

Article 15 prevents Member States from imposing on internet intermediaries, with respect to activities covered by Articles 12-14, a general obligation to monitor the information which they transmit or store or a general obligation to actively seek out facts or circumstances indicating illegal activities. This is important, as general monitoring of millions of sites and web pages would, in practical terms, be impossible and would result in disproportionate burdens on intermediaries and higher costs of access to basic services for users. [73] However, Article 15 does not prevent public authorities in the Member States from imposing a monitoring obliga tion in a specific, clearly defined individual case.[73] In this context, it is important to note that the reports and studies on the effectiveness of blocking and filtering applications appear to indicate that there is not yet any technology which could not be circumvented and provide full effectiveness in blocking or filtering illegal and harmful information whilst at the same time avoiding blocking entirely legal information resulting in violations of freedom of speech.

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

[19] The Order of the Court will incorporate provision for liberty to apply. By this mechanism the Plaintiff, if necessary and if so advised, will be able to seek further relief from the Court if there is any recurrence of the offending publication. Of course, in such eventuality, it will be open to Facebook, acting responsibly and in accordance with the principles and themes clearly expressed in this judgment, to proactively take the necessary removal and closure steps.

[20] I refuse the Plaintiff's application for the wider form of interim injunction sought by him. This was to the effect that Facebook be required to monitor the offending webpage in order to prevent republication of the offensive material. In this respect, I prefer the argument of Mr Hopkins that such an order would lack the requisite precision, could impose a disproportionate burden and, further, would potentially require excessive supervision by the Court. See Cooperative Insurance v Argyll [1997] 3AL ER 297, pages 303 – 304, per Lord Hoffman. See also Halsbury's Laws of England, Volume 24 (Fourth Edition Reissue), paragraph 849. The propriety of granting this discrete remedy will, of course, be revisited at the substantive trial, against the backcloth of a fuller evidential matrix, which should include details of how this social networking site actually operates from day to day.

It’s a place where, in stark contrast to the perks lavished on Facebook employees, team leaders micromanage content moderators’ every bathroom and prayer break; where employees, desperate for a dopamine rush amid the misery, have been found having sex inside stairwells and a room reserved for lactating mothers; where people develop severe anxiety while still in training, and continue to struggle with trauma symptoms long after they leave; and where the counseling that Cognizant offers them ends the moment they quit — or are simply let go.

The moderators told me it’s a place where the conspiracy videos and memes that they see each day gradually lead them to embrace fringe views. One auditor walks the floor promoting the idea that the Earth is flat. A former employee told me he has begun to question certain aspects of the Holocaust. Another former employee, who told me he has mapped every escape route out of his house and sleeps with a gun at his side, said: “I no longer believe 9/11 was a terrorist attack.”

The use of contract labor also has a practical benefit for Facebook: it is radically cheaper. The median Facebook employee earns $240,000 annually in salary, bonuses, and stock options. A content moderator working for Cognizant in Arizona, on the other hand, will earn just $28,800 per year. The arrangement helps Facebook maintain a high profit margin. In its most recent quarter, the company earned $6.9 billion in profits, on $16.9 billion in revenue. And while Zuckerberg had warned investors that Facebook’s investment in security would reduce the company’s profitability, profits were up 61 percent over the previous year.

. 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.

Can technology resolve these issues? As regards technical solutions, there are already examples of these, such as YouTube’s Content ID, an automated piece of software that scans material uploaded to the site for IP infringement by comparing it against a database of registered IPs. The next challenge may be how these types of systems can be harnessed by online platform providers to address extreme and hate crime content. Again the dilemma for policy- and law-makers may be the extent to which they are prepared to cede control over content to technology companies, which will become judge, jury and executioner. 

who should bear the cost of monitoring and removal.

o block access to websites where infringing content has been hosted. In Cartier International AG & Ors v British Sky Broadcasting Ltd & Ors [2016] EWCA civ 658 the Court of Appeal concluded that it is entirely reasonable to expect ISPs to pay the costs associated with implementing mechanisms to block access to sites where infringing content has been made available

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.