The Minefield
The blogsphere is in panic mode. Next year the new youth protection treaty kicks in, and it’s clear that the government has written some truly spectacular rules for something it fundamentally doesn’t understand. The regulations are vague as hell—basically cost-traps disguised as policy, written by people who have no idea how the internet actually works. The whole thing seems designed to kill cultural diversity online.
Everyone’s scrambling to figure out what to do. For me, the math is simple and completely impossible at the same time. I could classify my entire site as 18+. Sure, most of my readers are adults anyway. But that’s suicide. A gate page kills traffic, kills impressions, kills every metric that actually matters to an advertiser. No one buys ads on a site that looks like it’s hiding something.
The insane part is that Spiegel Online and Bild get exempted because they’re considered general interest
—whatever that actually means. They can publish whatever they want. I have to audit every article, every image, every comment against regulations that don’t make sense. It’s economically impossible. It’s legally uncertain. There’s no way to actually comply.
The government has proven something with this treaty: they don’t understand what they’re regulating. They’re writing rules about a system they don’t use, don’t participate in, and clearly don’t comprehend. And if it wasn’t so sad, the whole thing would be funny—the biggest intervention in digital culture in German history, written by people who have never really used the internet.
But it’s not funny. I’m sitting here trying to figure out if I should shut down, comply anyway and hope I don’t get destroyed, or somehow pay fines that are impossibly large. Maybe emigrate. Maybe close it all down. Maybe just keep going and see what happens. The road will be rocky. I might not be around to see the other side of it.