EU Commission fines AliExpress €550 million for breaches of the Digital Services Act
The Chinese platform is accused of failing to take adequate action against the sale of counterfeit and dangerous products; it is required to submit compliance obligations and action plans by October
From our correspondent Beda Romano
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BRUSSELS – The European Commission has today, Monday 20 July, once again imposed sanctions on a major digital company, criticising the Chinese group AliExpress for not doing enough to prevent the sale of illegal, unsafe and counterfeit products on its platform. The EU executive has therefore accused the Asian company of breaching the rules of Digital Services Act. On this occasion, it imposed a fine of 550 million euros on the company.
“The proliferation of counterfeit clothing, unsafe toys, dangerous cosmetics and other illegal and harmful products,” explained Henna Virkkunen, Vice-President of the European Commission , in a statement, “is not an inevitable cost of online shopping: it constitutes a failure on the part of AliExpress to fulfil its obligations under the Digital Services Act. The scale of the business is no excuse; risks must be identified and addressed systematically.”
In essence, the European Commission criticises AliExpress for failing to employ sufficient staff to assess the goods sold online; of failing to assess the risk that its promotional system might contribute to the dissemination of illegal products; and of using only a single quantitative metric to minimise the presence of prohibited goods on its sales platform as much as possible. Hence the fine of over half a billion euros.
The European Commission considers, amongst other things, that AliExpress does not have sufficient tools to assess the quality of goods, to penalise sellers who breach the rules, and to prevent the circulation of counterfeit products. The decision regarding AliExpress comes after another Asian e-commerce platform, Temu, was fined (€200 million) for the same reasons (see *Il Sole/24 Ore* of 29 May).
AliExpress now has until 20 October to submit an action plan. The European Committee on Digital Services will have one month from receipt of the plan to draw up its opinion. Brussels will then have a further month to adopt its final decision and set a reasonable deadline for implementation. Failure to comply with the non-compliance decision may result in the imposition of periodic penalty payments.
