42 2024 TSMA their platforms; • comprehensive information requirements vis-àvis those customers trading on their platforms (“traders”) and the creation of reliable and swift communication channels with those traders; • a duty to fully cooperate with market surveillance and enforcement authorities and to notify them swiftly of the existence of unsafe or even dangerous products on their platforms. Operators of online marketplaces also have to ensure that appropriate measures have been taken to inform consumers without undue delay about products that are not in compliance with the EU’s safety requirements. The EU will need to establish adequate online communication tools with consumers so that they can swiftly notify the POMP of any safety-related issue regarding a certain product. The extensive powers conferred to the EU and national authorities in this context (including the creation of technical tools to be able to access and screen in an automated fashion the website presentation and other business information of a POMP) raise numerous constitutional and privacy concerns. It remains to be seen how national courts within the EEA and the European Court of Justice will deal with these highly sensitive topics. The GPRS Safety Gate For many years, the EEA-wide information system RAPEX was in place. This informed consumers and national market surveillance authorities about unsafe products with the authority to withdraw these from the EU’s internal market. It has now already been renamed Safety Gate and under the GPRS’s regime, its competencies will be significantly extended. The Safety Gate consists primarily of three elements: The Safety Gate Rapid Alert System, the Safety Gate Portal, and the Safety Business Gateway. POMPs have to be registered there and need to name a central, single point of contact. They also need to carefully and continuously monitor the Safety Gate’s websites to check whether any of the products listed there are offered for sale by any of their traders. If POMPS realize that any of their B2B clients (traders) are offering unsafe products on their platform, they are required to first issue a warning and, provided such warning remains fruitless, temporarily ban the traders on the respective platform. To enforce such mechanisms, appropriate contractual arrangements between the POMPS and the respective traders should be in place. However, the Safety Gate is at this stage not yet fully operational. It also undoubtedly creates a lot more red tape and additional administrative costs and burdens for this specific category of platform operators and others. As with other commercial operators, POMPs
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