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Frank Peterson v Google, YouTube/Elsevier v Cyando

The EU harmonized VAT e-commerce rules applying as of 1 July 2021 have far-reaching consequences, particularly for the liability of platforms. In addition, some Member States recently adopted domestic liability regimes for platforms which can be differentiated into three models, and it appears that these regimes will remain in place after 1 July 2021. In this article, the combination of EU harmonized and domestic legislation with respect to VAT platform liability is explored. In the author's view, some domestic liability regimes are not proportionate and go further than necessary to reach the intended aim and the combination of EU harmonized and domestic legislation regarding VAT platform liability is problematic.

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.