The EU on the protection of minors

The EU on the protection of minors

by Fulvio Sarzana, Lawyer, Law firm Sarzana and Associates

Overall, the adopted strategy builds on the European Strategy for a Better Internet for Children adopted in 2012. The latter has influenced national policies across the EU and has been recognised internationally, but it had somewhat outlived its usefulness, to the point that, in March 2021, the Commission adopted a first communication calling for an update of the 2012 strategy, in order to establish a safer environment for young people online. The strategy also follows the historic interim political agreement recently reached on the Digital Services Act, which contains new guarantees for the protection of minors and prohibits online platforms from displaying targeted advertising based on the profiling of minors.

 

The EU on the protection of minors

The objectives

The difference in objectives between the DSA and the Commission's proposal is that the former focuses on online platforms and intermediaries, establishing principles to be applied to large platforms without overturning the core legislation in force for over twenty years, namely the E-Commerce Directive. The latter, however, seeks to put the child at the center, establishing principles, including technological ones, to protect them.

The goal is ambitious but the conditional is a must, not only because, beyond the declarations of principle, the Commission's strategy, dated 2012, has not yielded the desired results, also due to rapid technological obsolescence, but also because the so-called "ethicalizing" rules often tend to overlap the legitimate needs for protection with inhibitions that achieve the opposite result.

The problems

Strategies based on technological inhibitions and possible preventive surveillance obligations present different practical orders of problemsThe first concerns the "transfer" of inhibitory and investigative powers, in the broadest sense, to commercial companies that do other things for a living, with the risk that bans on platforms become opportunities to achieve the exact opposite: inadequately monitored discrimination of sources and content.

 

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