DCPR: Action Plan

 

The establishment of the DC PR aims at fostering a cooperative multi-stakeholder effort in order elaborate concrete and interoperable solutions to protect platform-users’ human rights.

To that end, the involved stakeholders will interact via the DC PR mailing list in order to jointly delineate a set of model contractual-provisions, defined as Platform-User Protections (PUPs).

While the long-term objective of the DC is to produce model contractual clauses that ensure the protection of individual rights in a range of contexts, the first exercise of the DC will be the definition of a set of PUPs focusing on the specific issue of content removal. The aforementioned goal will be achieved through several steps:

a) A consultation period aimed at identifying current best practices, e.g. recognising current contractual provisions/mechanisms utilised by platform providers for content removal and the related remedies to challenge the removal decision;

b) The elaboration of draft PUPs and the circulation of the different draft as Request for Comments on the DC PR mailing-list;

c) Finalisation of PUPs as soon as the “rough consensus” around the most appropriate wording will crystallise;

d) Definition of appropriate PUP labels (similar to those utilised to characterise the various Creative Commons Licenses) to be associated with each PUP. The utilisation of PUP labels will be instrumental to enable platform providers to signal the inclusion of PUPs in their ToS and help Internet users to easily identify the platform-providers who are committed to securing the respect of human rights in a responsible manner.

In recent years, several initiatives have been organised in order to scrutinise and assess platforms’ ToS, particularly in the context of intermediary liability. For this reason, the first step of the DC PR will be to take stock of the existing initiatives in order to envisage the most accurate strategy to put in place the aforementioned steps. Such stocktaking exercise will take place at the first meeting of the DC PR that will be open to all interested stakeholders.