Everything Wet and Loud Was About to Go Dark
The soaking-wet sex, the legally-adjacent profanity, the nipples bouncing past at 8am—all of it was almost regulated into a 10pm time slot by a German broadcasting treaty that barely anyone had heard of until the whole internet started screaming. The proposal went by the bureaucratic name JMStV, and in early 2010 it was moving quietly through state ratification while the rest of us were busy posting things we probably shouldn’t have.
The mechanics were the kind of thing a bureaucrat designs when they’ve never actually used the internet: mandatory age classifications for every website, adult content locked behind a 10pm–6am window, site operators held personally liable for any comment their users posted, and complete blocks on foreign sites that refused to comply with German standards. No exemptions for small operators, no carve-outs for blogs, no acknowledgment that a comment section with twelve readers and no moderation budget was not structurally equivalent to a broadcast network. If your users could type, you were responsible for what they wrote.
The list of casualties would have been long. Not just the obvious targets but the whole texture of the early web—Netzpolitik had been tracking the details for months, and the AK Zensur working group had published a formal response, but it took the full cascade of blogs, comment threads, and republished outrage to push it into general consciousness. Facebook, Tumblr, SuicideGirls, any platform with the wrong kind of content and no interest in restructuring its operation around one country’s regulations—gone from German routers. The blogs I actually read. This site. All of it dependent on whether a handful of state parliaments decided that "youth protection" meant a curfew on the open web.
It failed. North Rhine-Westphalia blocked ratification at the end of 2010 and the proposal died without ceremony. But the instinct behind it didn’t go anywhere. The idea that free expression online is a problem to be managed, that the correct response to discomfort is a filter or a liability clause—that thinking never went away. It just kept finding new legislation to inhabit. The 1984 comparisons felt a bit much in 2010. They feel somewhat less hyperbolic now.