The Firewall They Said Was for the Children
The German parliament passed a law in June 2009 to block websites. The stated justification was child pornography, which is the kind of rationale that short-circuits dissent before it can form—who wants to be seen arguing against that? Nobody. That’s precisely why it gets chosen.
The actual mechanics of the law—domain-level blocks maintained by the BKA, the federal criminal police—had nothing to do with protecting children, and everyone who thought about it for more than ten seconds knew it. Blocking a URL doesn’t remove the content, doesn’t arrest the perpetrators, doesn’t rescue anyone. It makes the problem invisible to the casual browser while leaving the underlying infrastructure completely intact. People actually embedded in those networks said as much. You don’t fight a crime by hiding the crime scene from people who weren’t going to commit it anyway.
What the law established—what made it genuinely alarming—was the machinery. Once you have a national blocklist with a government agency controlling it, the list can grow. It will grow. Child pornography is the opening argument; the architecture is the point. China built its firewall one justified exception at a time. The logic is always the same: a terrible thing exists, we have the power to make it invisible, why wouldn’t we use that power? And then the power finds new applications, because power does.
The Pirate Party, still young and raw and mostly dismissed by serious people, organized protests across German cities under the banner of delete, don’t block. They were right. The free, international, ungoverned quality of the net was genuinely at stake—not in a paranoid way but in a structural way, the kind of erosion that happens quietly, layer by layer, until one day you’re explaining to someone younger what it used to be like and they look at you like you’re describing something mythological.
I wanted people to go to those protests. I still think that was the correct instinct, even knowing the law was eventually struck down. You don’t show up because you’re certain it’ll matter. You show up because the alternative is deciding in advance that it won’t.