The Minefield
For a few weeks in late 2010, every independent website operating out of Germany faced a version of the same question: comply with a new law that would effectively destroy you, or find some other way to exist. The proposed Jugendmedienschutzvertrag—a Youth Media Protection Treaty agreed upon by Germany’s sixteen state governments—would have required all online publishers to review every piece of content they’d ever posted for potential harm to minors, and to lock anything borderline behind an age-verification splash page accessible only between ten at night and six in the morning.
The law was written by people who had never tried to run a website. This was visible in every line of it. The definitions were so vague that almost any editorial content could theoretically qualify as youth-endangering—a frank essay on relationships, a photograph with nudity, a comment section that nobody had fully moderated. The intent was child protection. The mechanism was a legal minefield that made compliance impossible to verify and fines essentially arbitrary.
What made it particularly infuriating was the exemption carved out for legacy media. Spiegel Online and Bild—institutions that between them have published decades of content considerably more damaging than anything I ever put on this site—were classified as serving the "general interest" and therefore exempt from the new rules. Small independent publishers would carry the full cost. The existing power structures of German media would operate exactly as before. The law wasn’t protecting children. It was protecting incumbents.
I didn’t know what to do. The options on the table were all bad: classify everything as adult content and accept the traffic death sentence that came with mandatory age-gating, restrict posting hours to the dead of night, delete everything that might conceivably raise a flag, or just close down. The idea of emigrating—moving the server, or myself, to somewhere with a functioning understanding of how the internet works—genuinely crossed my mind. That’s the quality of panic a sufficiently stupid law can generate.
Schleswig-Holstein’s parliament voted against the treaty in December, killing it. The blogosphere exhaled. But the few weeks of uncertainty between the threat and the reprieve left something behind—a clearer sense of what these institutions think about independent publishing, which is that it’s a problem to be managed rather than a culture worth protecting. The people who wrote that law weren’t malicious. They were just completely, comfortably ignorant, and they had the power to make that ignorance expensive for everyone else.