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You are CEO of Google. When you wake up tomorrow morning, your general counsel calls you: "we've been sued in the E.U. for copyright infringement! The claim: our search results for Le Parisien and dozens of other newspapers used more than one word and/or beyond a 'short extract.'" Your response: "is this April Fools’ day?"

The present submission has the object of providing comments and recommendations regarding a very specific provision included in the document mentioned in the title, that is the specific proposed duty for intermediaries to:

“deploy technology based automated tools or appropriate mechanisms, with appropriate controls, for proactively identifying and removing or disabling public access to unlawful information or content.”

I have a new article coming out, called Who Do You Sue? State and Platform Hybrid Power over Online Speech. It is about free expression rights on platforms like Facebook or Twitter, which the Supreme Court has called “the modern public square.” One section is about speakers suing platforms. It looks at cases – over thirty so far – where users argue that companies like Facebook or Twitter have violated their free expression rights by taking down legal speech that is prohibited under the platforms’ Community Guidelines.

Tool Without A Handle: “A Mere Gallimaufry”

This blog has spent a good deal of real estate discussing networked information technologies as tools, but has not yet dealt thoroughly with the qualifier in its title: tools “without handles.” The addition of “without a handle” is intended to indicate that my primary metaphor of a tool in the control of a user - and thus my general preferred approach to Internet policy and regulation, favoring individual control and accountability for uses of tools – needs to be leavened a bit.