The Politics of Internet Filtering: The United Kingdom and Germany in a Comparative Perspective

Abstract

Debates around appropriate regulation of Internet content have become increasingly common in liberal democracies, despite the fact that relatively little is known about the actual processes of Internet content regulation. The following article studies the institutional development of content regulatory institutions in the United Kingdom and Germany to explore this phenomenon. It will be argued that the divergent paths of Internet filtering in both countries can be understood by looking at the development of the relevant regulatory institutions. As most Internet filtering and content regulation is implemented through private actors, the article will explore the relationship between public and private actors in both countries in the evolving regulatory debate. In this context it can be argued that the ability of the UK and Germany to enforce their own policy goals depends primarily on the ability of the state to make credible regulatory and legislative threats towards private actors. In conclusion it is suggested that the coercion of private sector actors is a key regulatory practice not just in online content regulation but in the wider field of Internet governance.

Cyber Security Politics

“…This dynamism accounts for shifts in the focus of cyber security and the understanding of sovereignty. In this context, Albania, like many democracies, has developed a fragmented, multi-actor system of cyber and internet regulation (Wagner 2014). The previous exclusively state-controlled governance regime has given way to a mixed governance regime of networks (Collins 2008) and to less hierarchical forms of governance (Héritier 2001), which have empowered other actors besides the state in cyber governance.…”

YASM (Yet Another Surveillance Mechanism)

“…Finally, there is no point in discussing "perfect" privacy, if the supposed materials are later de-encrypted and then decided on by a human in the loop who is not part of law enforcement of any state. This is regardless of the supposed safeguards which NGOs [69] and other structures that may include specialists, as they will still not be faced with public ethical and legal rules of conduct or enjoy the legitimacy of being hired by the state in question.…”

Urheberrechtspolitik in Deutschland.

“…Einige Studien dokumentieren diese Verbindungen, indem Sie Fälle aufarbeiten, die Urheberrecht mit anderen Internetthemen wie Netzneutralität (Horten 2013(Horten , 2016, Internetfilter und Zensur (Breindl und Küllmer 2013;Fritz 2013), Datenschutz und Privatheit (Sarikakis und Rodriguez-Amat 2013) sowie Überwachung und Sicherheit (Mueller et al 2012), kritische Meinungsäußerungs-und Beteiligungsfragen (Wagner 2013(Wagner , 2014, die Regulierung von Internet Service Providern und Plattformen (Farrand 2016;Tusikov 2017)…”