News and Research articles on Germany

Since Twitter labelled a tweet by Donald Trump as ‘potentially misleading’ and indicated that it was fact-checking the statement made, the US President signed an ‘Executive Order'. Amélie Heldt finds that far from being new, the situation illustrates how torn we are when it comes to intermediary immunity or rather liability.

Reading between the lines and the numbers: an analysis of the first NetzDG reports

Amélie Heldt, Hans-Bredow-Institut
PUBLISHED ON: 12 Jun 2019 DOI: 10.14763/2019.2.1398

The German Network Enforcement Act is an attempt to counteract the effects of hate speech on social media platforms. This paper analyses and evaluates the reports on the handling of complaints about unlawful content after its coming into force.

Analysing internet policy as a field of struggle

Julia Pohle, Berlin Social Science Center (WZB)
Maximilian Hösl, Berlin Social Science Center (WZB)
Ronja Kniep, Berlin Social Science Center (WZB)
PUBLISHED ON: 25 Jul 2016 DOI: 10.14763/2016.3.412

The internet and its regulation are the result of continuous conflicts. By analysing policy fields as fields of struggle, this essay proposes to observe processes of discursive institutionalisation to uncover core conflicts inscribed into internet policy.

Rebalancing interests and power structures on crowdworking platforms

Ayad Al-Ani, Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG)
Stefan Stumpp, Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG)
PUBLISHED ON: 30 Jun 2016 DOI: 10.14763/2016.2.415

This paper is part of Regulating the sharing economy, a special issue of Internet Policy Review guest-edited by Kristofer Erickson and Inge Sørensen. Disclaimer: This study was completed with the support of the German service sector union ver.di. We would like to thank the participating platforms and their communities for the opportunity to conduct a survey. We would also like to thank the jovoto platform for the implementation of an idea contest. Thanks also go to Prof. Dr. Christian Fieseler, BI Norwegian Business School and Prof. Dr. Wrona, TU Hamburg-Harburg, for their comments and reviews. Any errors remain the responsibility of the authors. Introduction and objectives Working on …

’Governance by Things’ as a challenge to regulation by law

Wolfgang Schulz, Hans-Bredow-Institut for Media Research, Hamburg
Kevin Dankert, Hans-Bredow-Institut for Media Research, Hamburg
PUBLISHED ON: 30 Jun 2016 DOI: 10.14763/2016.2.409

In this article the 'Internet of Things' is considered to be a new, powerful governance factor challenging regulation by law described as the ‘Governance by Things’.

Tuning old DSL in Germany: the race is on

Monika Ermert, Heise, Intellectual Property Watch, VDI-Nachrichten

PUBLISHED ON: 1 Aug 2014

For less than a week now, German internet access providers have completed filing their requests for reservations of vectoring locations - in which they can offer vectoring enhanced internet access to customers. Vectoring technology allows to push broadband speed of old DSL subscriber lines to 100 Mbit/s by removing what the experts call 'crosstalk', an interference in the copper bundles resulting from putting more and more data onto them.