24 DELFI AS v. ESTONIA JUDGMENT the number of comments. The Government referred to the domestic courts’ finding that Delfi had not acted with the due diligence required in commerce – it had not taken measures which would have precluded the risk of violation of other persons’ rights. At the same time, the domestic courts had not prescribed to Delfi how it should perform its duties, leaving this matter for the applicant company and considering that there were various means of doing this. 65. The Government argued that the applicant company was not a hosting service provider for the purposes of the Information Society Services Act when publishing comments posted on Delfi’s articles. A hosting service provider offered merely a data storage service, while the stored data, their insertion, removal and content (including ability to remove or change the stored data) remained under the control of service users. In the Delfi commenting environment those commenting lost control of their comments as soon as they had entered them, and commenters could not change or delete their comments. Thus, Delfi was not a technical intermediary in respect of comments, but a content service provider. It deleted and modified comments if needed, and had also done so prior to the Supreme Court’s judgment, playing therefore an active role of such a kind as to give it knowledge of, or control over, the data relating to the comments to its articles. The fact that Delfi had taken measures to minimise insulting comments, for example by screening, demonstrated that Delfi had actually been aware of its liability. 66. The Government also pointed out that the comments in question had not attacked the public limited company concerned, but a member of its supervisory board personally, and could not therefore be justified by the exercise by the press of its role of a “public watchdog”. The comments had resorted to offensive and intemperate language and had gone beyond a generally acceptable degree of exaggeration or provocation; they had not stimulated any reasonable public discussion. 67. Lastly, the Government considered that the sum the applicant company had been ordered to pay L. as compensation for non-pecuniary damage (corresponding to EUR 320) had not had a “chilling effect” on the freedom of expression. 2. The third-party intervener’s arguments 68. The Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights in Warsaw provided an analysis of the Polish law concerning the liability related to publication of materials on the Internet. It noted that Polish case-law was inconsistent. In some cases news portals had not been held responsible for comments posted by the readers, in other cases blog-owners or forum administrators had been held responsible for third-party comments. The Helsinki Foundation reiterated that prior restraint was a particularly restrictive measure, and it