The fate of democracy

After month of struggeling the German conservatives have more or less managed to publish their program for the upcoming national elections in Germany. The CDU / CSU (Christian Democratic Union / Christian Social Union) have also written a few paragraphs about the internet. Nothing to be happy about, because their policy is characterised by censorship, controll and ignorance. In a good comment, Kai Biermann on Zeit.de (you can read it here in German) shows why this is the case.

I like to take his article as a starting point for my own thoughts on this. Let me first give you a few examples, I allow myself to use the ones Kai Biermann used in his article.

Blocking the internet access of a speific user who has breached copyright law is one of these ideas. The French tried that and guess what happend? The French constitutional court declared that law unconstitutional. No reason for the German conservatives to change their mind, they still think it is a great idea.

Conservatism in its lexical meaning often refers to presevering things. That is proably why CDU and CSU came up with the great idea of reintroduction protectionism to the internet.

Their idea is as stupid as it is simple. In order to protect print media they want to make sure that publishers of print to do have any disatvantages at all within the online world. To achieve this they are willing to introduce laws to protect the print media of the influence of the internet. The idea is not only simple and stupid, but as Kai Biermann observes, also somewhat old, as it basically constitutes the introcution of protective duties. Other newspapers have managed the transition from the print world to the online world successfuly. Yes, it is a challenge, and yes, some newspapers and magazines might not survive it. But others might do and they need support for this. They need to be guided and they need to be encouraged. Nothing of this will be done with the conservatives program.

And the last idea is probably the worst one. Censorship. Nobody in his right mind would make an argument for the protection of child pornography and neither do I. But the law designed by the conservative minister for family, children, youth and the elderly Ursual von der Leyen is just an advancement towards censorship. The federal police will be allowed to produce a blacklist of websites which internet service providers than have to block by putting up a “stop sign” when their users visit such sites. The idea is to stop people accessing website with child pornographic material. Here is what this makes a very bad idea. First of all it actually doesn’t stop child pornography, simply because the content is still there, second of all the federal police decides which site is on the list, they prosecute and they enforce. No seperation of power. After much criticism there is now a plan to introduce a juridical advisory panel. Nevertheless this law opens the door wide for censorship because the state can add other unwanted content on their as well, such as ego-shooter games or unwanted political content. If they would really want to do something against child pornography they would actually need to work out how the internet works. Obviously they are not smart enough for this task.

Just a few words on the relationship between security and freedom here. Because in the end this is just another example for this. Governments are more and more willing to restrict their citizen rights. We saw this in regards to anti-terrorism legislation. Often enough the Courts, either on national level or on European level (in this case the European Court of Human Rights) sacked national legislation or disagreed with the governments’ claims that the threat of terrorism is a legitimation for restricting civil and human rights. It remains to be seen how the censorship debate develops within Germany. So far, only one thing seems to be certain. Voting the conservatives in the next national elections in Germany is not a good idea.

[sassan]

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