digital platform – Official Blog of UNIO

Inês Neves (Lecturer at the Faculty of Law, University of Porto | Researcher at CIJ - Centre for Legal Research | Member of the Jean Monnet Module team DigEUCit)

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Aware of the shortcomings arising from the lack of changes to the European Union’s legal framework governing online platforms and digital services, practically since the adoption of the Directive on electronic commerce[1] of 2000, the European Commission presented the Digital services Act package[2] in December 2020. It seeks to ensure and strengthen European digital sovereignty in terms that guarantee fundamental rights and the affirmation of the Union (also on the international stage) as a community of values and rights whose applicability should not depend on the online vs. offline divide. To this end, the options initially pursued, favouring non-interference, minimal regulation,or even the immunisation of intermediaries from any liability, soon proved insufficient to respond to the new digital challenges.

The imperative to provide European citizens and businesses with a secure digital space, respectful of fundamental rights, as well as open, contestable, and fair, is therefore at the origin of a fundamental paradigm shift of increasing responsibility that marks the genetic identity of the digital services package. The vision of a “minimal” European Union is thus replaced by the imposition of a set of obligations on platform service providers, according to a model of ex-ante regulation.

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Teresa Coelho Moreira (Associate Professor with Aggregation at the Law School of the University of Minho | Integrated member of JusGov )

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Nowadays there is an app for everything or almost everything, from simpler activities, such as food delivery, to more complex ones, such as providing legal services, with new digital platforms emerging every day. Indeed, in theory, any activity can be transformed into a task that can be performed through digital platforms and we witnessed this during the pandemic.

In view of this situation, one of the issues that assumes enormous importance is the qualification of the existing relationships between those who provide the activity in digital platforms, with numerous cases having been already ruled around the world.

Bearing this situation in mind, the importance of establishing presumptions increases. However, the presumption provided for in Article 12 of the Portuguese Labour Code, although positive, was envisaged for typical labour relations, for employment relations in the pre-digital era. Regarding the new ways of providing work, the work in digital platforms, it is necessary to recognize the inadequacy of the presumption of employment to face the emerging problems of the new ways of working through digital platforms. Factors such as, inter alia, the ownership of work equipment and instruments, the existence of a work schedule determined by the beneficiary of the activity and the payment of a certain remuneration, are classic signs of legal subordination, but they are hardly operational signs to address the new types of dependency resulting from the provision of services for a particular company, via platforms.

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