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The Unfair Contract Terms Directive: fit for purpose?

An analysis of consumer protection in the digital age

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When

14 March 2022

15:00 - 17:00 CET

Where

Zoom

Organised by

The EUI Private Law Working Group and European Union Law Working Group are hosting a joint event featuring guest speaker, Dr Mateja Durovic, EUI alumnus and Reader in Contract and Commercial Law at The Dickson Poon School of Law of King’s College London. In the event, Durovic will discuss the 1993 Unfair Contract Terms Directive and whether it is still adept to protect consumers in this digital age as well as possible reforms to this Directive.

The UCTD 1993 is one of the oldest pieces of key European consumer legislation formulated before the internet’s development in the late 1990s and still in force, with few significant changes made since its formulation. As the most significant piece of consumer legislation not amended following the recent consumer Fitness Check, it is questionable whether the Directive remains fit for purpose in regulating the terms and conditions in the user agreements and policies of social media platforms. This talk first examines the unfair-terms problems highlighted by regulatory actions around the world against Tiktok and Facebook with its subsidiary Whatsapp, two of the world’s most widely-used platforms, which illustrate the inadequacies in the minimum protections currently afforded by the UCTD.

The talk then assesses the potential and limits of personalised data-based reforms to the UCTD, in procedural notification requirements and substantive unfair-terms controls, before demonstrating how the UCTD could be brought up-to-date while preserving commercial certainty and avoiding dramatic changes. This could be done simply by mandating measures that are already being taken, either by social media platforms themselves or by other major tech companies, and by elaborating existing requirements with standards that are analogous to other already-existing consumer rights.

This event is free and open to all. Please register via the link above by Sunday, 13th of March. The Zoom link will be shared with registered participants prior to the event.

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