Internet censorship in Germany

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Internet censorship in Germany is practiced by law as well as the effect of some court decisions. An example of content censored by law is the removal of web sites from Google search results that deny the holocaust, which is a felony under German law.

In June 2009, the Bundestag passed the Access Impediment Act or Zugangserschwerungsgesetz^[1] that introduced Internet blocking of sites found to distribute child pornography.^[2][3] Against the backdrop of an intense political debate, the law did not come into force until federal elections in September 2009 changed the setup of the governing coalition. In talks between the new governing parties CDU and FDP, it was agreed that no blocking would be implemented for one year, focusing on take-down efforts instead. After one year the success of the deletion policy would be reviewed.^[4] The governing parties ultimately decided in April 2011 to repeal the law altogether.^[5]

Most cases of Internet censorship in Germany, however, occur after state court rulings. One example is a 2009 court order, forbidding German Wikipedia to disclose the identity of Wolfgang Werlé and Manfred Lauber, two criminals convicted of the murder of the Bavarian actor Walter Sedlmayr. In another case, Wikipedia.de (an Internet domain run by Wikimedia Deutschland) was prohibited from pointing to the actual Wikipedia content. The court order was as a temporary injunction in a case filed by politician Lutz Heilmann over claims in a German Wikipedia article regarding his past involvement with the former German Democratic Republic's intelligence service Stasi.^[6]

The first known case of Internet censorship in Germany occurred in 1996, when the Verein zur Förderung eines Deutschen Forschungsnetzes banned some IP addresses from Internet access.^[7]

See also

• Internet in Germany

References

Censorship
Media regulation	Books (books banned) Films (banned films) Internet circumvention Music Post Press Radio Speech and expression Thought Video games
Methods	Bleeping Book burning Broadcast delay Burying of scholars Censor bars Chilling effect Concision Conspiracy of silence Content-control software Euphemism Minced oath Expurgation Fogging Gag order Heckling Heckler's veto Internet police Memory hole National intranet Newspaper theft Pixelization Prior restraint Propaganda Purge Revisionism Sanitization Self-censorship Speech code Strategic lawsuit Surveillance computer & network mass Whitewashing Word filtering Damnatio memoriae
Contexts	Criminal Corporate Hate speech Ideological Media bias Moralistic fallacy Naturalistic fallacy Politics Propaganda model Religious (Islamic) Suppression of dissent Systemic bias
By country	Censorship Freedom of speech Internet censorship