European justice opens the door to holding Google accountable
The Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that Google can be held legally responsible for videos published on YouTube that promote illegal gambling when the company maintains a commercial agreement with the content creator and shares advertising revenue with them. The ruling responds to a query from the Italian Judiciary within the framework of a dispute between Google and the Authority for Communications Guarantees, which in 2022 imposed a fine of 750,000 euros on the company for disseminating videos promoting online gambling prohibited in Italy.
Google had appealed the sanction, arguing that it acted solely as a data hosting provider and that European e-commerce regulations exempted it from responsibility for content published by third parties. The court clarified that this protection only applies when the platform plays a strictly technical, automated, and passive role, without knowledge or control over the hosted information.
According to the CJEU, this condition is no longer met when the platform analyzes a channel to enter into a commercial partnership agreement with its creator. In this process, Google must review the channel's theme, its most viewed videos, recent publications, and other metadata, which gives it concrete knowledge about the content disseminated. The ruling does not automatically declare the company responsible but returns the case to the Italian Judiciary, which must determine whether, based on that commercial relationship, Google could reasonably have known that the channel promoted gambling activities prohibited by the country's legislation.
The court's interpretation establishes a criterion with a potentially much broader scope. The decision suggests that digital platforms that enter into commercial agreements with content creators could lose the exemption from liability provided for intermediaries when they have sufficient knowledge of the activity carried out on those channels. The criterion could also impact other social media companies, which in recent years have invoked these exemptions to reject sanctions linked to user-generated content. In fact, the same Italian authority had previously sanctioned X for the dissemination of gambling-related advertising.
Tags: Court of Justice of the European Union, YouTube, AGCOM, illegal gambling