For the purpose of this Regulation, the following definitions shall apply:
- ‘information society services’ means services within the meaning of Article 1(1)(b) of Directive (EU) 2015/1535;
- ‘recipient of the service’ means any natural or legal person who uses the relevant intermediary service;
- ‘consumer’ means any natural person who is acting for purposes which are outside his or her trade, business or profession;
- ‘to offer services in the Union’ means enabling legal or natural persons in one or more Member States to use the services of the provider of information society services which has a substantial connection to the Union; such a substantial connection is deemed to exist where the provider has an establishment in the Union; in the absence of such an establishment, the assessment of a substantial connection is based on specific factual criteria, such as:
- a significant number of users in one or more Member States; or
- the targeting of activities towards one or more Member States.
- ‘trader’ means any natural person, or any legal person irrespective of whether privately or publicly owned, who is acting, including through any person acting in his or her name or on his or her behalf, for purposes relating to his or her trade, business, craft or profession;
- ‘intermediary service’ means one of the following services:
- a ‘mere conduit’ service that consists of the transmission in a communication network of information provided by a recipient of the service, or the provision of access to a communication network;
- a ‘caching’ service that consists of the transmission in a communication network of information provided by a recipient of the service, involving the automatic, intermediate and temporary storage of that information, for the sole purpose of making more efficient the information’s onward transmission to other recipients upon their request;
- a ‘hosting’ service that consists of the storage of information provided by, and at the request of, a recipient of the service;
- ‘illegal content’ means any information,, which, in itself or by its reference to an activity, including the sale of products or provision of services is not in compliance with Union law or the law of a Member State, irrespective of the precise subject matter or nature of that law;
- ‘online platform’ means a provider of a hosting service which, at the request of a recipient of the service, stores and disseminates to the public information, unless that activity is a minor and purely ancillary feature of another service and, for objective and technical reasons cannot be used without that other service, and the integration of the feature into the other service is not a means to circumvent the applicability of this Regulation.
- ‘dissemination to the public’ means making information available, at the request of the recipient of the service who provided the information, to a potentially unlimited number of third parties;
- ‘distance contract’ means a contract within the meaning of Article 2(7) of Directive 2011/83/EU;
- ‘online interface’ means any software, including a website or a part thereof, and applications, including mobile applications;
- ‘Digital Services Coordinator of establishment’ means the Digital Services Coordinator of the Member State where the provider of an intermediary service is established or its legal representative resides or is established;
- ‘Digital Services Coordinator of destination’ means the Digital Services Coordinator of a Member State where the intermediary service is provided;
- ‘advertisement’ means information designed to promote the message of a legal or natural person, irrespective of whether to achieve commercial or non-commercial purposes, and displayed by an online platform on its online interface against remuneration specifically for promoting that information;
- ‘recommender system’ means a fully or partially automated system used by an online platform to suggest in its online interface specific information to recipients of the service, including as a result of a search initiated by the recipient or otherwise determining the relative order or prominence of information displayed;
- ‘content moderation’ means the activities undertaken by providers of intermediary services aimed at detecting, identifying and addressing illegal content or information incompatible with their terms and conditions, provided by recipients of the service, including measures taken that affect the availability, visibility and accessibility of that illegal content or that information, such as demotion, disabling of access to, or removal thereof, or the recipients’ ability to provide that information, such as the termination or suspension of a recipient’s account;
- ‘terms and conditions’ means all terms and conditions or specifications, irrespective of their name or form, which govern the contractual relationship between the provider of intermediary services and the recipients of the services.