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Cologne Administrative Court: defeat for the federal government in the anti

2022-03-01T18:36:27.642Z


The Network Enforcement Act, also known as the »Anti-Hate Act«, is intended to oblige online platforms to report certain content to the BKA. Google and Meta sued – initially successfully.


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#Hate and #baiting: Violating EU regulations when introducing a paragraph

Photo: Fabian Sommer / dpa

On Tuesday, the administrative court in Cologne published a long-awaited decision on the German law against hate crime on the Internet and partially approved an urgent application by Google and the meta group.

Accordingly, the legislator violated EU regulations when introducing the new paragraph 3a of the Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG), as the court announced.

With Paragraph 3a of the NetzDG, the Federal Ministry of Justice wanted to oblige large social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter or the Google subsidiary YouTube to pass on user data to the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) in certain cases: if the social media companies see like someone spreading swastikas or inflammatory content, then the posts no longer just have to be deleted, they also have to be passed on to the BKA.

(Read more about how the BKA central office should actually work here.)

Meta with its subsidiaries Instagram and Facebook and Google with its video platform YouTube are not implementing the guidelines and have filed a lawsuit against them.

The Cologne Administrative Court has now decided on the urgent applications from Google and Meta from June 2021.

The companies had asserted their complaint with violations of EU law and national constitutional law.

The court partially followed suit.

However, according to a statement, the court did not determine whether the regulations on data transfer to the BKA are fundamentally incompatible with EU law, but emphasized above all that the procedure for introducing the laws by the federal government did not meet the requirements.

Those involved can appeal against the resolutions at the Münster Higher Administrative Court.

A complaint against data retention took a similar path a few years ago.

This is now with the European Court of Justice.

The German authorities involved initially did not comment on whether they wanted to take action against Tuesday's decisions.

The BKA central office has been working in a so-called "alternative scenario" since the beginning of February.

Since the social media companies do not provide any data, the BKA accepts reports from civil society bodies (Read more about the alternative scenario here.)

hpp/reuters

Source: spiegel

All tech articles on 2022-03-01

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