Taiwan: NCC Unveils Legal Framework for Draft Digital Communications Act

Taiwan's NCC commissioners approved the legal framework for the draft Digital Communications Act (“Act”) on 29 December 2021.

The draft Act contains 11 chapters, four of which stipulate obligations to be imposed on providers of intermediary services, hosting services (which might include Google Drive, Dropbox, and other cloud storage service providers) and online platform services (which might include YouTube, Facebook, Yahoo, and Dcard).

According to the draft Act, online platform service providers will be divided into online platform service providers and designated online platform service providers. The designated online platform service providers, which operate on the platform that has the stronger market influence, will bear relatively greater responsibility.

Online service providers will be asked to regularly produce transparency reports, offer internal and external relief systems, disclose information regarding online sellers, present guidelines for the handling of user complaints, and ensure that the platform will not be abused. To protect the interests of users, when the platform deletes a user's comments or imposes restrictions on users, the users must be notified of the reasons for the same and provided a relief system.

Designated platform operators will be required to conduct independent auditing and risk assessment and management, in addition to bearing also the obligations placed on online platform operators.

The NCC indicated that the final draft of the Act is planned to be delivered to the Executive Yuan by June or July of this year for approval.