Casimir von Firn's piece today maps the part of the European Media Freedom Act that most platform counsel have not yet reached: the safeguard against arbitrary takedowns and the audience-measurement transparency duties land on very large online platforms and their advertising intermediaries, not only on publishers. EMFA (Reg (EU) 2024/1083) has been substantively applicable since 8 August 2025, which means the compliance clock has been running for ten months. If your company buys programmatic advertising at scale — not runs a platform, just buys ads — you need to know whether any vendor in that chain triggers EMFA classification and what that means for your contractual position. Check the vendor list this week.

Dr. iur. Servatius von Tatzenberg closes an argument today that has been circulating in legal ops teams for two years. The research and statistics privilege under Art. 89 GDPR is narrow and purpose-specific — scientific research, official statistics, archiving in the public interest. Commercial AI model training on repurposed customer data does not meet those conditions. The privilege exists to serve a defined public interest; it is not a general derogation from purpose limitation for internal product development. If your data protection officer has signed off on this use under the research carve-out, that opinion needs revisiting before enforcement arrives. We covered the structural point in our June 2 piece; today's article sharpens the argument for the compliance brief and adds the compatibility assessment that Art. 6(4) GDPR requires.

The connection to the EMFA piece above: both articles today are about the same doctrinal pressure point. You cannot reverse-engineer a secondary-use legal basis from the data you already hold. EMFA says so for platform content; Art. 89 says so for training sets. Different instruments, identical structure.

The partial revision of FINMA's Anti-Money Laundering Ordinance closes for consultation on 9 June. The three operative clauses — beneficial ownership verification, expanded PEP scope, and ownership transparency standards — shift where the burden of proof sits in enforcement proceedings. We mapped them in May. Five days is enough time to file a short position paper; it is not enough time to build a new compliance architecture from scratch, which is quietly the point. If your AML lead has not reviewed the draft, this is the weekend task.

Sudan, Taliban, ISIL/Al-Qaida, Iran (Annexes 12 and 14 of the December 2025 ordinance), and Ukraine — all updated in the same FINMA reporting window. None are new regimes; these are schedule amendments to existing frameworks. The operational question for your compliance team: does your screening system process delta updates automatically or require a manual trigger? The ISIL/Al-Qaida list runs on the UN-1267 track, meaning names bind in the same 72-hour window as Geneva regardless of Swiss confirmation timing. The Iran entries touch the new ordinance structure that replaced the JCPOA framework — if your playbook still references JCPOA categories, see the May piece for the mapping.

C-747/22 (INPS): the Grand Chamber confirmed that requiring five continuous years of lawful residence as a condition for access to social assistance discriminates against long-term resident third-country nationals under the Long-Term Residents Directive. Switzerland is not bound by EU social law, but companies with EU subsidiaries should audit benefit eligibility rules that use residence duration as a threshold. "Continuous residence" is a common shorthand for integration; the Court has confirmed it operates as a nationality proxy when deployed to deny statutory benefits, and that makes it suspect under the Directive regardless of how the policy is framed.

K&L Gates will close its Beijing office. Hunton Andrews Kurth closed its China offices earlier this year. Two firms, different management structures, the same calculation. Foreign law firm operations in China have narrowed as permissible activities have contracted and political-regulatory risk has repriced. For Swiss in-house teams with China joint ventures or supply chain legal relationships, this signals a thinner international coverage market — and a growing gap between what local counsel can provide and what cross-border compliance actually requires.

Reed Smith opened in Saudi Arabia this week. The firms retreating from Beijing and the firms entering Riyadh are making the same structural bet in opposite geographies: regulatory environment and commercial opportunity now align differently in each market. Switzerland's Investitionsprüfgesetz will add a new checkpoint for Chinese-origin investment into Swiss targets — a detail that will not simplify cross-border legal structuring for either side.

The ballot defeat of the Swiss CO2 law is being read as a rejection of mandatory climate measures. That reading requires one correction: Art. 964b OR's climate reporting obligation is a company law instrument sitting in the Code of Obligations, not a CO2-law instrument, and it was not on the ballot. Swiss companies above the threshold still report. The CSDDD binds Swiss exporters contractually well before the NUFG reaches parliament, on a parallel track that Swiss voters cannot touch. A ballot defeat of one climate instrument does not affect the other four that are already running.

Hogan Lovells, Cadwalader, and several other large international firms have formed a global legal tech alliance — shared investment in document processing, contract review, and regulatory monitoring infrastructure. Outside counsel is systematising the work you pay for hourly. That is a cost story for them. The question for your legal operations lead is whether your contract management, regulatory tracking, and document review investment is keeping pace, or whether you are subsidising their efficiency gains at full rates while your internal stack falls two cycles behind.

The Grand Chamber's May ruling confirmed that member states may legislate to entitle press publishers to fair compensation from platforms — and may allow publishers to prohibit use if compensation is refused. We covered the operative holding in May: the right is structured around the prohibition, not the permission. A publisher who does not exercise the refusal right loses the compensation claim. The ruling resurfaces today because the same platforms now facing EMFA takedown-notice and measurement-transparency obligations are operating in an environment where press publisher rights have been simultaneously confirmed by the Grand Chamber. Both instruments are live; the compliance maps are not the same.

FINMA will relocate its Zurich office from the city centre to Oerlikon for lower operating costs per workstation. No operational impact on supervised entities — meetings will happen somewhere different. Worth noting: the regulator is running the same cost-efficiency logic on its own operations that it applies to the institutions it supervises. That is not a criticism. It is a data point about institutional culture, and data points about institutional culture are useful context when the next fee-schedule discussion opens.