Mediator designation + availability

Description

Mediator designation is the EU Platform-to-Business Regulation's small but operationally specific requirement that an online intermediation service identify at least two mediators it is willing to engage with for out-of-court dispute resolution with business users, and publish those mediators by name in its terms of service. The Digital Services Act extends and parallels a related obligation for in-scope hosting and online platform services with respect to user complaints under Articles 21 and 22, with the DSA framework adding certified out-of-court dispute settlement bodies as the operative category in addition to mediators. The substantive shape under P2B Article 12 is fairly precise. The platform identifies at least two mediators in its terms of service. Each mediator has to be reasonably willing and able to engage in mediation, accessible from the location of the business user (which for a pan-EU marketplace usually means a Brussels-or-equivalent location plus at least one geographically distant alternative), and operating in the language of the terms of service. The good-faith engagement obligation runs on the platform side: the obligation is to participate in mediation in good faith, not to settle. The platform bears a reasonable proportion of the mediation costs, with the proportion determined by the mediator in light of the parties' relative size and resources. And the designation is published in the terms in a way that the business user can actually invoke (a contact path that goes to a designated mediator role rather than a sales team), not buried in a definitions appendix. The practical decomposition is three pieces. The first is mediator selection: most operators designate two mediators from among the certified consumer-mediation bodies in Belgium, the Netherlands, or another member state with a well-developed mediation infrastructure, picking ones with English-language capability and with experience in platform-business-user disputes (the German and Italian schemes have produced several published mediations operators can study). The second is the engagement-terms documentation: who pays, what happens if the mediator is unavailable for a particular dispute, what timeline runs from the request to the first mediation session, and how the result binds the parties. The third is the visibility surface in the terms of service, which includes the mediator names, their contact information, and the language of mediation. The piece that surprises operators is that the obligation is to be willing to engage. It is not satisfied by a clause that says the platform reserves discretion to mediate or not, and it is not satisfied by a mediator-name list with no documented standing engagement. Designation also does not displace the underlying contract or the available litigation paths; it is an additional channel that the business user can invoke when a P2B dispute arises, and the existence of the mediation channel does not bar the parties from court. Most platforms discover the obligation when they revise their terms for the first time after entering the EU intermediation perimeter and find that the standard-form terms inherited from US-anchored counsel do not include it; the cheap fix is to add the mediator block to the terms, designate the two mediators by name, and stand up the engagement-terms document before any business-user dispute actually arises, because doing the designation under time pressure with an open dispute already running is materially harder.

Applicability

Applies when: business model role is intermediary or mixed.

How predicates are evaluated

Required by (1 regulation)

• EU P2B

  Article 12 — at least two mediators identified in terms; reasonably willing and able to engage, accessible from the location of the business user, operating in the language of the terms; good-faith engagement obligation on the platform.

  Regulation (EU) 2019/1150

  Source →

Fulfilled by (1)

• In-house build · low effort

Magist does not accept payment from vendors. Methodology.

Evidence formats

• mediator agreement
• mediator-disclosure section in ToS