Once again platform liability: On the edge of the "Uber" and "Airbnb" cases

Nataliia Filatova-Bilous

Internet Policy Review: Journal on Internet Regulation, 2021, vol. 10, issue 2, 1-27

Abstract: Online platforms are considered as very powerful economic agents often tending to obtain oligopolistic or even monopolistic positions in the market. In this respect, the liability of platform operators has been constantly discussed among scholars. The sharpest issue in this respect is whether the platform operator may be held liable towards a platform customer for the violations caused by platform suppliers. Unfortunately, this issue has not been duly addressed yet. However, recently adopted CJEU judgements in Asociación Profesional Elite Taxi v Uber Systems Spain, SL (2017) and in Airbnb Ireland (2019) cases may be helpful in this regard. Although the mentioned judgments do not refer to liability issues directly, they still are indirectly linked to the latter. In this article I analyse the approaches provided by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in the mentioned cases and discuss their applicability to private disputes, in particular, to disputes on the liability of platform operators. I suggest that under the current regulatory regime established by European secondary legislation these approaches may be extrapolated to liability issues.

Keywords: Online platforms; Sharing economy; Platform operator; Business user; Customer; Platform liability; E-commerce (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/235965/1/1764289633.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:iprjir:235965

DOI: 10.14763/2021.2.1559

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Internet Policy Review: Journal on Internet Regulation from Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG), Berlin
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().