GSMA/ETNO position paper on the European Commission’s Proposal for a Regulation on preventing the dissemination of terrorist content online COM(2018) 640

Over the last years, the European Commission has proposed measures to further increase the fight against illegal content online. The latest proposal of September 2018 aims to prevent the dissemination of terrorist content online. GSMA and ETNO fully endorse the objective of the European Commission to effectively tackle the dissemination of terrorist content online.

At the same time, we are concerned that the draft regulation could have unintended effects, such as affecting telecom providers that in fact do not provide users with the capability to upload and share third party content to large audiences. Some of the services provided by GSMA and ETNO members are currently in the scope, to the extent that they act in the role of hosting service providers by offering cloud storage solutions. Given the broad range of proposed measures and related penalties, we believe that the scope of the initiative should be more carefully targeted to not unduly affect information society services and infrastructure providers that only operate on the edge of the public web. Furthermore, the suggested measures may disproportionately harm European citizens’ fundamental rights to information and expression protected by existing EU law.

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