Comments to European Commission on Notice-and-Action
CDT submitted these brief comments in response to a questionnaire from the European Commission on notice-and-action procedures (including the more familiar notice-and-takedown) and Internet intermediaries. The comments offer the following principles for ensuring that notice-and-action frameworks do not come at the expense of online free expression and access to information:
Intermediaries need clear guidance regarding what constitutes a valid notice.
Actions required of intermediaries must be narrowly tailored and proportionate.
Safeguards are necessary to mitigate risks of abuse.
Intermediaries should not be required to take actions that would create a de facto ongoing obligation to monitor.
Action requirements should take account of differences between conduit and host services.
Actions that result in content takedown must be limited to contexts where illegality is straightforward.
Notice-and-action requirements must avoid undermining existing liability protections.
Not All Guardrails Are Created Equal: Comparing Content Safety and Copyright Filtering
As courts and policymakers work through questions about chatbot liability, they should be wary of analogies that flatten meaningful technical differences. Copyright filtering and safety intervention share real challenges around ambiguity and evasion, but they diverge in what each control must assess, how each manifests over the course of a conversation, and how much can be verified from the outside.
Op-Ed: France’s Constitutional Council Ruling Tests the Limits of Social Media Bans
Read our analysis the legal and policy significance of the Constitutional Council’s decision on ongoing social media age restriction and age assurance debates ahead of the most-anticipated EU-wide approach on child online safety due by December 2026.
The brief explains that Section 230’s liability protections are essential to enable free expression online and they extend to the use of automated systems to engage to rank and order content as part of traditional publishing activities.
