Search results : 495

On 16 December 2022, the Netherlands' Autoriteit Consument en Markt (Authority for Consumers and Markets — ACM) issued a decree which declared binding the commitment made by the telecom operator T-Mobile to stop offering a data-free music service by 31 March 2023. The decree follows an important judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in September 2021, which held that so-called zero-ratings services are incompatible with EU Regulation (2015/2120) on open internet access (Open Internet Regulation) (see IRIS 2021-9/27). Under T-Mobile’s data-free music service...

On 18 November 2022, the Rechtbank Amsterdam (Amsterdam District Court) delivered a judgment on the scope of journalistic freedom. The case concerned an online newspaper article about the modus operandi of two fairly well-known legal and tax advisors. While the advisors were portrayed particularly negatively, the Court ruled that the article was not unlawful and did not have to be corrected. Importantly, it held that the advisors should be considered "public figures" subject to increased criticism, and that the statements in the article had had a suffient factual basis. The article...

On 1 December 2022, a major report on the safety of female journalists was published. It included the finding that 8 out of 10 female journalists in the Netherlands have experienced some form of intimidation, aggression, or threats; and that this was “alarmingly common”. The report was published by PersVeilig - a well-known joint initiative of Dutch journalists and law enforcement, comprised of the Dutch Association of Journalists, Dutch Association of Editors in Chief, the Dutch Police and the Dutch Public Prosecution Service - and aims to strengthen the position of...

On 10 October 2022, the District Court of Midden-Nederland (Rechtbank Midden-Nederland) published a significant judgment on the obligations of broadcasters to provide a right to respond. Notably, the Court refused to prohibit a broadcast over an alleged insufficient opportunity to respond, holding that “rebuttal is not an absolute right”, and the way in which a rebuttal is processed is part of “journalistic freedom”. The case concerned an episode of BOOS, an investigative journalism and consumer protection programme broadcast by the Dutch public broadcaster BNN-VARA....

On 4 October 2022, the District Court of The Hague (Rechtbank Den Haag) delivered an important judgment on whether online platforms can be ordered to remove harmful conspiracy theory content by a local government authority. Notably, the Court refused to order Twitter to remove conspiracy theory content that was “similar” to other content that had been ruled unlawful, finding that it would amount to an impermissible filtering obligation. The case arose in early 2021, when a number of individuals spread a story through Twitter, on the “Bodegraven story”, (“het verhaal...