Trade officials have until 11 September to hear from anyone who wants a foreign marketplace publicly named as a haven for fakes. The Commission opened its public consultation on the Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List on 11 June, and the written contributions it collects will shape the 2027 edition of a document that carries no penalties whatsoever.
That contradiction sits at the centre of the exercise. The watch list identifies online service providers and physical marketplaces located outside the European Union that, in the Commission’s phrasing, engage in, facilitate or benefit from substantial infringements of intellectual property rights, with piracy and counterfeiting the primary concerns. Inclusion triggers no tariff, no fine and no import ban. It produces a name on a list published by the world’s largest single market.
Rights holders treat that reputational instrument seriously because of what sits downstream. Payment processors, advertising networks, logistics firms and app stores all run their own risk assessments, and a listed marketplace becomes harder to serve without internal justification. Customs authorities read the list too. So do negotiators, who reach for it when intellectual property enforcement lands on the agenda of a bilateral trade dialogue.
The Commission is running a second, targeted consultation in parallel, on the state of intellectual property protection in third countries, which closes on the same date. Together the two exercises feed the evidence base for how Brussels ranks enforcement problems beyond its borders. Anyone submitting to one should read the other, because the questions overlap and the resulting documents get cited together.
Businesses that want a specific platform listed carry the burden of proof. The Commission asks contributors to explain why a named marketplace meets the criteria, which means volume of infringing listings, responsiveness to takedown requests, the presence or absence of seller verification, and whether the operator profits from the traffic. Vague complaints about a jurisdiction achieve nothing. Documented cases, ideally with dates and enforcement correspondence, achieve rather more.
There is a fair critique of the whole approach. Naming and shaming works on operators who care about respectability and glances off those who do not, and a marketplace that reincorporates under a new name every eighteen months treats the list as a cost of doing business. The Commission publishes these editions periodically rather than continuously, so listings can lag the actual market by a year or more. Sellers migrate faster than institutions publish.
The counterargument is that the alternative tools are worse. Litigating against an offshore operator through a foreign court system consumes years and money that most rights holders, particularly smaller ones, simply do not have. Border seizures catch physical goods but miss the digital piracy that increasingly dominates the losses. A published list costs the Commission almost nothing, reaches every commercial intermediary at once, and gives trade negotiators a concrete document to place on a table.
What the exercise cannot do is substitute for enforcement inside Europe. The Digital Services Act now imposes duties on marketplaces serving EU consumers, and customs rules govern what crosses the border. The watch list addresses a different problem, namely the operators sitting entirely outside that reach, where Brussels holds influence but not jurisdiction. Counterfeit goods reaching European doorsteps travel through both channels, and the list only illuminates one of them.
Contributions close at 23:59 Brussels time on 11 September. Firms that skip the deadline will spend 2027 explaining why their worst infringer never made the page.
