In recent years, the activity of influencers has become increasingly widespread and relevant, favoured by the rise and growing popularity of social networks. This phenomenon has profoundly transformed the dynamics of digital communication, influencing marketing, business strategies and consumer habits but, from a regulatory point of view, the legislator has never intervened to regulate their activity. Against this backdrop of increasing development of the profession, the interest of institutions – especially social security institutions – has grown in parallel, evidently wishing to include influencers in their contribution base.
At the same time, the normative-regulatory confusion related to the figure is witnessed, in recent years, by the difficulty of judges to frame the influencer in a precise manner, from a legal point of view, within the cases typified by the legislator.
This uncertainty has generated divergent interpretations and an uneven application of the rules, making the definition of a clear and coherent legal framework for the profession even more complex.
In this context, the relationship established with an influencer was, for instance, considered as a generic ‘self-employment relationship’ (Court of Fiscal Justice – Piedmont Region, No. 219/23); as a ‘sponsorship contract’ (Trib. Pavia, 16/1/23); until it was traced back to the typical ‘agency relationship’ by the Court of Rome, with decision No. 2615/24.
In the latter case, the Rome court upheld the claims of ‘Enasarco’, which had argued that certain influencers were agents, on the basis, inter alia, of certain typical elements of the agency relationship, such as those relating to the stable and continuous promotion of a company’s products.
This jurisprudential orientation highlights the tendency to trace the activity of influencers back to pre-existing contractual schemes, even in the absence of a specific discipline, raising questions about the adequacy of the current regulatory framework in effectively regulating this new professional reality.
Well, this latest pronouncement – known to most for having considered certain ‘sportsmen’, sports-related subjects, ‘personal trainers’ and ‘body builders’ in the same way as commercial agents – has opened the debate among insiders as to the scope of this decision, also in view of the important economic implications that may result from it.
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