DELFI AS v. ESTONIA JUDGMENT 23 exercised partial control, it was obliged to protect the honour of other persons, and the restriction concerned had a legitimate aim with regard to the applicant company. 62. The Government contended that the restriction was necessary in a democratic society. The vulgar, insulting and degrading value judgments contained in the comments in the present case had had no reasonable factual basis. There was therefore nothing in the comments which would have required the portal administrator to do any work to check their veracity. Since Delfi had not removed the posted comments on its own initiative, and it must have been aware that they were unlawful, the Estonian courts had justly found that Delfi’s omission was unlawful. The disclaimer stating that the comments were not the opinion of the applicant company and that the authors of comments were responsible for their content did not preclude the applicant company’s liability. 63. The Government argued that placing the obligation to monitor the comments and notify the portal administrator of offensive comments on the possibly injured parties was neither sufficient nor justified. Such a system did not ensure sufficient protection of the rights of third parties, as proven by the circumstances of the present case. Any information communicated via the Internet spread so quickly that by the time the inappropriate comments were finally deleted the public interest in the given news and the comments posted on it had waned. Measures taken weeks or even days later for protecting a person’s honour were no longer sufficient, because offensive or unlawful comments had already reached the public and done their damage. Since controlling the Internet was an impossible task for an ordinary person, the party with control over a specific portal had the duty to take action where necessary to prevent violation of personality rights. 64. The Government noted that Estonia had chosen to apply less restrictive civil – as opposed to criminal – liability in defamation cases. However, even if a court adjudicating a civil case was able to identify the IP address of a computer and the address where the computer was located, it was extremely difficult to identify the person who actually wrote the comment. Thus, as Delfi did not identify the commentators, this made it too difficult for an injured person to have recourse to the civil courts against anonymous authors of comments. Furthermore, the Government considered that the State’s enacting of a regulation providing for mandatory identification of commentators on an Internet portal would constitute an excessive interference. Thus, it was more suitable and proportionate in civil proceedings to place greater liability (joint and several) for defamation on a portal owner who provided content services. The Government pointed out in this context that Delfi was a profit-oriented company which had invited visitors to its portal to comment on its articles without identifying the authors of the comments. At the same time the income it earned depended on the advertisements published on the portal, which, in turn, depended on