Royal Decree on Digital Platform Service Businesses Sec. 17 — publication of the main parameters of ranking, advertising and review algorithms
Binds Operators of digital platform services subject to prior notification under Sec. 8 — a service with annual revenue from the platform earned in Thailand above THB 1.8 million for a natural person or above THB 50 million for a juristic person, or with more than 5,000 average monthly users. The Sec. 17 disclosure duty applies to the services listed in Sec. 16: platforms provided for remuneration that act as an intermediary in offering goods or services to consumers under contractual relationships with business users, and online search engines. Sec. 3 and the deeming rules extend the Decree to foreign operators serving users in Thailand, indicated by Thai-language display, a Thailand-signifying domain, Thai baht payment, Thai governing law or forum, or paid search placement for Thai users. The heavier Secs. 19 to 21 duties bind only large platforms — above THB 300 million annual revenue per service type, above THB 1 billion across all types, or users exceeding 10 per cent of the Thai population — and designated specified platforms. Impact tier: SME and enterprise.. The Royal Decree on the Operation of Digital Platform Service Businesses That Are Subject to Prior Notification, B.E. 2565 (2022), issued under Secs. 32 and 33 of the Electronic Transactions Act B.E. 2544, requires the platform operators identified in Sec. 16 to publish their terms and conditions of service clearly and appropriately, before or at the time the service is used. Section 17 fixes the minimum content of that publication and three of its limbs are algorithmic disclosure duties: the main parameters of the algorithms or of the criteria the operator uses to rank or recommend the list of goods or services to users; the main parameters of the algorithms or criteria used to present advertisements of goods or services to users; and the main parameters of the algorithms or criteria used to collect, moderate and publish user reviews. The same section also requires disclosure of service suspension or termination and remuneration terms, access to and use of data received from the service, support channels, the internal complaint-handling system and dispute resolution with time frames, and the rating of goods, services or content. Separately, operators designated as large or specified digital platform services under Sec. 18 must conduct risk assessments and implement mitigation measures, maintain system security, carry out crisis management, appoint compliance officers and undergo external audit (Secs. 19 to 21), and report annually on that compliance to the Electronic Transactions Development Agency (Sec. 22).
Commencement is computed from the face of the instrument: Sec. 2 provides that the Royal Decree comes into force after the expiration of 240 days from the date of its publication in the Government Gazette, and the publication footnote records Government Gazette Vol. 139, Part 78a, page 17, dated 23 December 2022. Two hundred and forty days from 23 December 2022 expire on 20 August 2023, so the Decree is in force from 21 August 2023. The Sec. 43 transitional rule gave operators already trading on the day before commencement ninety days from that date to file the prior notification, a window that closed on 19 November 2023, and Sec. 44 gave the Sec. 8 paragraph four operators one year. This is Thailand's first entry on the tracker. It is the ASEAN counterpart of cn-algo-recommendation and of the EU ranking-transparency model rather than of the data-protection line: it reaches ranking, advertising and review-moderation algorithms as a platform-transparency duty owed to users, not a right of an individual data subject against a decision. Thailand's Personal Data Protection Act B.E. 2562 contains no equivalent of GDPR Art. 22, so no solely-automated-decision right is tracked for Thailand. Text read in the official English translation published by the Electronic Transactions Development Agency, the supervising authority named in the Decree; ratchakitcha.soc.go.th returns HTTP 403 on its legacy document paths, so the ETDA publication is cited.
Stated maximum penalty — The Decree carries administrative rather than monetary sanctions. Under Sec. 33, where an operator contravenes or fails to comply with the rules, procedures or conditions in Chapter II — which contains Sec. 17 — or with Notifications of the Commission or the Agency, the competent official shall order the operator to stop providing the digital platform service until the rules have been correctly and fully complied with; if the operator fails to comply with that order within ninety days of its issuance, the competent official shall revoke the acknowledgement of its notification from the notification registry, notify it in writing and publish the revocation publicly through the Sec. 14 channel. Revocation removes the operator's lawful basis to trade in Thailand, since Sec. 8 makes prior notification a condition of operation.