[hwh]

A notion in the more calmed legal discussion (as opposed to lobby talk from the freedom movements, which I usually support but feel to be very narrow-sighted at the moment w/ regard to this law - see what is now carried into the comments here) is that this effect might be mitigated by a counterweight law - or rather addendum - that mitigates overreaction by the corporations.

This is german legal culture: our law system is first, foremost and mostly codified. And regulation is used more heavily than in the US law system.

Note that the stated goal of the law is most probably the exact point: making access to effective defense of your rights possible to anyone. The reality consisted of slow law enforcement (which has to act against people who made the speech in question, often anonymous or denying having done it), inaccessible data of the other party (for civil suits) and an intransparent mechanism that did not follow the german legal system on behalf of the corporations.

[zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC]

> Note that the stated goal of the law is most probably the exact point: making access to effective defense of your rights possible to anyone.

Which is completely and utterly fails at in the obvious way, in that your right to free speech is limited by a strong incentive for corporations to silence you if in doubt?

> The reality consisted of slow law enforcement (which has to act against people who made the speech in question, often anonymous or denying having done it)

And the solution to insufficient law enforcement is to have some private corporation do the job instead? I don't think that many people disagree that there was a problem, but the solution is terrible and creates lots of problems itself.

[hwh]

It mostly mirrors classic consumer protection law. It's a civil law issue and regulation in such issues is always a try to remedy imbalances of power. As law enforcement goes, there is no public office assigned to deal in behalf of a party in civil law cases. There's the courts, which are slow and arguably understaffed and with a much higher bar to access them in the first place. And regulation. Regulation does not always get it right and I'm not arguing that it did here. My point is that there was a problem and regulation tried to solve it. I don't see that bad effects were intended, which is the point I was trying to make. I think that the legal discussion in Germany mostly prefers an addendum to, not a revokation of the law in question.

[anigbrowl]

Which speech acts are likely to incur legal sanction, exactly? What about the effects of those speech acts upon their subjects? The German approach is to hold the speaker liable for that cost. Some speech acts reduce the freedom of other people.