European Commission involves Chinese companies in its crusade against illegal content 欧盟委员会邀请中国公司参与打击网络非法内容

The internet is global.  If someone still had any doubt, such skepticism will easily be overcome by the list of top online platforms from the US, Europe and Asia invited by the European Commission for a closed-door meeting on 9th January to discuss tackling of illegal content online.

互联网是全球性的。如果还有人存疑，那么当你看到受邀参加欧盟委员会于1月9日举行的闭门会议的来自美、欧、亚洲顶级在线平台的名单时，这些疑虑将随之被打消。此次闭门会议专门针对打击网络非法内容进行了讨论。

Reflecting the rising importance of Chinese internet giants, Alibaba and Tencent were among the companies with whom the Commission is seeking to set up voluntary cooperation procedures.

由于中国互联网巨头日益重要，阿里巴巴和腾讯也在欧盟委员会寻求建立自愿合作程序的公司之列。

Amongst the attendees were Commissioner King (far left), Commissioner Avramopoulos (2nd Left), Commissioner Gabriel (4th from left), Vice-President Ansip (3rd right), and Commissioner Jourova (far right) (Source: European Commission)
参会人员从左至右为欧委会委员King（左一），委员Avramopoulos（左二），委员Gabriel (左四)，欧委会副主席Ansip（右三），委员Jourova（右一）

Two years ago, the Commission set in place a Code of Conduct under which Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and Microsoft have been voluntarily removing hate speech from their sites. In June 2017, the European Council called on the industry to further develop new technology to improve automatic removal of speech inciting terrorist acts. Few months ago, the Commission adopted a Work Program to promote cooperation with social media company to tackle illegal content.

两年前，委员会制定了一套行为准则，根据该准则，Facebook，Twitter，Youtube和Microsoft已经自愿地从他们的网站上删除了仇恨言论。 2017年6月，欧洲理事会呼吁业界进一步开发新技术，以提高自动屏蔽煽动恐怖主义行为言论的能力。数月前，欧盟委员会通过了一项工作计划，以期通过促进与社交媒体公司的合作来解决网络非法内容的问题。

The aim of the meeting of 9 January seems to have been to warn the internet giants that the EU may legislate, if they did not speed up cooperation with the EU Commission to monitor on-line content.

1月9日的闭门会议似乎是在警告互联网巨头们，如果他们不加快与欧盟委员会的合作对网络内容进行监控，那么欧盟可能会考虑立法。

Given that such legislation would apply also to platforms not established in the EU, the legislation is likely to have extra-territorial effects.  The EU Commissioner in charge of international relations was nevertheless not present. One can therefore infer that the EU is mulling over unilateral initiatives with a global reach, instead of bringing up the matter in a multilateral framework, such as the Internet Governance Forum.

鉴于这样的法律同样适用于不在欧盟区建立的平台，立法可能会产生域外效应。欧盟负责国际关系的委员并未出席此次会议。据此我们可以推断，欧盟正在考虑在全球范围内采取单方面举措，而不是在诸如互联网治理论坛这样的多边框架内提出这一议题。

What the five commissioners reported on this event via twitter can be seen below.

五位欧盟委员会委员在Twitter上关于此次会议的评论如下。