Child sexual abuse online Regulation: moving the debate forward

Executive summary

DIGITALEUROPE fully supports the goal of creating a comprehensive legal framework to ensure better protection of children against sexual abuse and exploitation online.

Our members play an important role in the battle against this horrible crime and take this responsibility seriously. They have carried out extensive work to fight child sexual abuse and exploitation online, including developing technology vital to its prevention, detection, removal and reporting. We welcome the European Parliament’s position on the proposal, which has moved the debate forward. Many aspects of the Parliament’s position represent a significant improvement that will help protect children online whilst reflecting technological realities and safeguarding fundamental rights. The Council should take inspiration from this and move swiftly to adopt a position.

To this end, the final Regulation should:

• Create the right conditions for industry to develop and deploy mitigation measures by providing appropriate derogations from the ePrivacy Directive (ePD) that are not contingent on receiving detection orders. This will allow providers to continue to expand on their efforts to fight child sexual abuse on their services with sufficient legal certainty;
• Include the Parliament’s text on infrastructure services, mirroring the e-Evidence Regulation, which better reflects the technical and contractual capabilities of infrastructure services;
• Restrict detection orders to known child sexual abuse material (CSAM), with a commitment to reassess the scope at a later stage based on the robustness of technologies; and
• Include the Parliament’s text proposed protection for end-to-end encryption (E2EE) technology. Encryption plays an important role in providing private and secure communications that users, including children, demand and expect to keep them safe online