I'm confused because CUII at:
https://cuii.info/en/about-us/
says (translated):
> The CUII was founded by Internet access providers and rightholders and coordinates the implementation of court blocking procedures and the enforcement of court blocking orders.
CUII is saying that they enforce court orders. I guess that language doesn't preclude them from also blocking other sites.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250130115412/https://cuii.info... said
> The Clearing Body for Copyright on the Internet (CUII) is an independent body in Germany. It was founded by German internet access providers and copyright holders to objectively examine whether the blocking of access to a given structurally copyright-infringing website in Germany is lawful. When copyright holders submit an application, a review board examines whether the relevant requirements are met. If they are, the review board then recommends a DNS-block of the structurally copyright-infringing website in question. Every recommendation of the review committee must be unanimous and only apply to clear cases of copyright infringement. The recommendation is then forwarded to the German Federal Network Agency for Electricity, Gas, Telecommunications, Post and Railways (Bundesnetzagentur - BNetzA). If the examination by the BNetzA does not reveal any concerns about the DNS-block according to the provisions of the EU Net Neutrality Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2015/2120), the CUII then informs the internet access providers and the applicants accordingly. In such cases, the internet access providers participating in the CUII then block the corresponding domains of the structurally copyright-infringing website in Germany.
related post by the same author, which mentions the current version of the website: https://lina.sh/blog/cuii-gives-up
> The CUII now only coordinates blocks between ISPs after a court order. That's it. No more secret votes. No more corporate censorship. The new version of their website says: "The CUII coordinates the conduct of judicial blocking proceedings and the implementation of judicial blocking orders."
So yes, they USED to just block whenever they wanted, based on "previous similar cases" but without a court order (or a pending one). They then got a lot of flak from the regulatory bodies and switched to actually only include court ordered blocks.
Still I would heavily recommend to just use a non-german DNS service.
Fast forward to today, Americans are pushing you for self censorship through force and denial(if you don’t speak in line with the admin, you will have hard time in your US public sector job or if you want to travel to US) and Europeans find all kind of other ways.
Tough new world order. I used to be advocating for resolution through legal/political means, but now I'm inclined to believe that the solution must be technological because everybody wants security and control. Nobody wants loose ends. Everyone is terrified of some group of people will do something to them, freedom is out of fashion and those claiming otherwise want freedom for themselves only. The guy who says want to make humans interplanetary species is posing with people detained for traveling on the planet without permission. Just forget about it.
So this website itself is about censorship, therefore people interested in this shouldn’t be using websites. New tools are needed, the mainstream will be controlled the way the local hegemony sees it fit.
I came to a similar conclusion, what happened in the 90s and early 2000s is since the govs had restricted freedom in the physical/real world a lot of young people took refuge in the Internet.
It became harder for an individual to build his own house or start a business, but you could make a website pretty much free from regulations and impediments.
But governments and a lot of interested parties slowly invested the Internet and now we are complaining it sucks. The common Internet and web suck anyway now because it is full of bots, AI generated content, hard to search and you need to prove you are a human every 5 minutes.
We need to create new networks and places just because it is fun and it will take some time for the govs to follow us there: freenet, yggdrasil, alfis, gemini, reticulum, B.A.T.M.A.N, etc.
Taking a step back, I support the ideals (the good ones at least) of what I’d perceived that our country was founded on. I also support the individual people in our police and military, but not the fascist orders that they’re having to fulfill. I think the majority of these people joined to uphold law and order or to protect all people in-general, I don’t think they want to be doing these things some of them are being ordered to do, and I think that continuing to do bad things is how fascists are able to take hold.
This is a predicament, because it’s like you’re driving the bus and a fascist jumps into your lap with a gun to your head and takes the wheel, while he has others put guns to the head of your family and others on the bus. No one asked for this, and I still feel like there are many that believe that there is nothing we can do and that it will take care of itself. But the gerrymandering law that just passed in Texas, on top of everything else that was already in place, is another warning that this won’t go away on its own.
I get what you’re saying about sending people to space, but I think that being able to get off our big rock if we can do so without destroying other life and other places in the universe is worth time and effort. Even natives that lived with the land and life that existed had to move sometimes, life and all that exists physically that has space is to some degree nomadic.
Check out "Ordinary Men" by Christopher R. Browning.
What delectable naivete.
Besides copyright, especially among Americans, I find that its completely O.K. to censor content it is bad for business. A major one is censorship in order to be advertisement friendly but anything flies, even the guy owns the thing and can do whatever he pleases is good enough for many(slightly controversial).
Would you ban all propaganda? Russian propaganda? Propaganda from countries engaged in illegal wars? How many social media or news sites survive? Heck, how many sites that allow comments and user interaction survive?
Yours is the "think of the children" argument, makes you feel warm and fuzzy when it aligns with your interests but you won't have a leg to stand on by the time it's used against you. Banning is just sweeping some of the trash under the carpet. The ones wielding the ban hammer don't care that most of the trash is still out in the open (social media?), they just need to open the door to arbitrary banning. The ones applauding the ban hammer are lacking the same critical thing that would otherwise handle propaganda and misinformation very well: education.
If you want your child to not smoke you don't just hide the cigarette pack on a higher shelf, you teach them what smoking is and does.
Meanwhile all the RT type crap is flooding social media under thousands of names. But that's fine as long as enough rubes are tricked into thinking banning one site did anything to solve the propaganda issue.
But CUII is formed by a private oligopoly, with anonymous judges, implementing vague rules, trying to keep secret even what they block. All while limiting what the vast majority of Germans (who don’t know what DNS is) can access on the internet. IMO that’s the issue.
It is a tool that entrenches current powers that be, system wise. Who decides what the "common" good is? the one in power.
It also hides societal problems and signals that could be used for policymaking.
The acceptance of censorship honestly scares me, and i grew up on stories of oppressive communist regime - full of censorship, secret police etc.
and frankly, commercial censorship might be even worse - it is a "for profit" enterprise, common good be damned.
and one last thing - even if you fully trust your current government, you're just one elections away from something vastly different. They will have access to the same powers that you've granted them(indirectly, by voting).
It's tough to imagine what this might look like. I suspect it's too late.
Device attestation is becoming more prevalent, and required for increasingly more functionality. Passkeys are breathing down our necks.
Alternate protocols can only exist if the corporate and governmental powers look the other way. We have Signal and VPNs and BitTorrent and tor, but for how long?
And moreover, does it even matter what protocols we want to use, if most of us use devices that are fully controlled by the tech giants who want to do the censorship?
Ideally you would have good government involvement to enforce traffic neutrality, but that's out the door. I'm sure this has been talked to death but ground level P2P infrastructure is what I would be rooting for.
To me, those 2 sentences contradict each other. Doing it through copyright rights, and doing it for money and business sound pretty much the same to me. But you're saying that traditionally one wasn't considered censorship, but the other was considered censorship.
Censorship is state/company mandated retraction or blockage of certain information. Copyright is state/company mandated blocking of certain forms of expression.
Copyright permits you to publish any idea you so desire, only that you don't plagiarize someone else while doing so. (Which is always possible, as the fair-use doctrine is a thing)
Copyright law is absolutely a justification of and mechanism for censorship.
It may arguably be socially beneficial censorship, but then that's what is claimed by proponents of every basis and means of censorship.
Removal of content due to copyrights is censorship, you are being denied to spread or consume certain content. It's not different than defining that some content is protected with "national security" or however else you define it and then prevent the spread and consumption of it. Same thing, different excuse.
You can use placeholders to see it more clearly, i.e. "This content is X therefore in accordance to the law needs to be removed, failure to do so may lead to prosecution and penalties of Y"
You can replace X with anything, including "copyrighted material", "support for Hamas terrorism", "hate speech", "defamation of our glorious leader","communist propaganda", "capitalist propaganda", "self harm".
What a fun way to completely invalidate anyone who doesn't agree with you that "freedom is out of fashion"!
If a low six figure number of people in a handful of states had voted last fall, none of the lawlessness that we’ve seen this year would have happened. The people telling you that voting is useless are enjoying the fruits of suckers believing them.
That also happens to be what the people in power would like you to believe.
The current US administration even called out the EU countries for excessive censorship so they have nothing to do with this.
Why can't people stay on topic without bringing Trump in the discussion every 5 minutes?
The issue is that they're not commonly used, and even if that changes, the ISPs can roll out harder-to-bypass censorship methods like SNI inspection or IP blocks.
You can't win the war against corporate censorship and malicious anti-freedom politicians through purely technical means. But you can sure make it much harder for them.
DNSSEC gives you the ability to verify the DNS response. It doesn’t protect against a straight up packet sniffer or ISP tampering, it just allows you to detect that it has happened.
DoT/DoH are better, they will guarantee you receive the response the resolver wanted you to. And this will prevent ISP-level blocks. But the government can just pressure public resolvers to enact the changes at the public resolver level (as they are now doing in certain European countries).
You can use your own recursive, and this will actually circumvent most censorship (but not hijacking).
Hijacking is actually quite rare. ISPs are usually implementing the blocks at their resolver (or the government is mandating that public resolvers do). To actually block things more predictably, SNI is already very prevalent and generally a better ROI (because you need to have a packet sniffer to do either).
For everything else, there's I2P and Tor.
An even easier start, just set up unfiltered encrypted DNS on your devices. E.g. Njalla DNS or Mullvad DNS. Or get a good VPN such as Mullvad.
At the same time, keep voting for privacy. And send letters to your politicians!
and there is also 9.9.9.10, which does not perform any blocking (if it does, then no one has noticed that, which is unlikely)
Are they using nsd or bind or … did they write their own?
I did not go though the details of the proposed Swiss law to be honest so it might be obvious why they are doing that but still why Germany instead of some other place (like Mullvad being in Sweden) ?
Hence, I think Proton's move is really about reducing costs, with the potential Swiss law as an excuse.
And it sounds like blackmail: "if you don't do what we ask, we leave the country". Seems like more and more companies are doing that. Interesting to use blackmail while defending freedom, if you ask me.
- create a vanity TLD with high renewal fees
- register a bunch of sites that are mirrors of already seized domains
- mention them in enough places they get noticed
- ???
- profit
Even if they were actually seized, do you think if the police seize a rental car they'll be paying the rental fee until they give it back?
Also, blocking websites typically doesn't involve ICANN, the infringing website still owns the domain. They just order ISPs in the country to lie on some DNS queries, which is the reason why such blocks are so easy to work around.
They also mention Movistar, O2, and Vodafone. A systematic violation of the internet's integrity, carried out on the scale of an entire so-called "free" EU(!) country. It's a disaster.
Wait, is that why yesterday internet was so janky? Encountered multiple websites that seemed offline when visited from my home (Spain) Vodafone connection, but all my remote servers could still access them. In my decade+ of living here, never heard of them doing a "Ah today it's Saturday, lets block Cloudflare" thing until this very moment. Have any resources (Spanish or English) where I can read more about this? Fucking ridiculous if this is true.
Can you lock millions of users out of Internet? If that's not elite in 2025, who is?
Pedro Sanchez forced a public investment (€1134 billion) into that company using the SEPI so he can control Telefonica. Then he changed Telefonica president with a socialist pawn, inserted many socialist "elite" into the company, and as a cherry on top, he embedded Huawei inside Telefonica core systems.
Even better, do this resolution over Tor.
Doing that would bypass any state level stupidity, inflicted by an oligopoly, state actors, or similar.
But now, I'm seriously considering something better than that.
Surprisingly, thepiratebay.org is available for me though without issues. My previous ISPs here (Movistar, Orange, Jazztel) were all blocking thepiratebay.org
Seems to be pretty hit/miss what exact domains various ISPs block here. I would have imagined the police/courts serve like a centralized .txt file (simplified) the ISPs just fetch once a day or whatever, but seems to be way less organized than that, for better or worse.
“Your internet provider can’t block or throttle websites. The open web stays open.” Open Internet (Net Neutrality) Regulation (EU) 2015/2120 Official text on EUR-Lex
It's not the government directly, but what is called in German "Flucht ins Privatrecht" [escape into private law], meaning that the government "outsources" such activities to private organizations that are only very indirectly charged by the government (implying that you cannot use public law to sue the government, but you have to sue the respective organization indirectly. Also, since the relationship between the government and the respective organization is very indirect, the politicians can claim that they are not responsible for the organization's wrongdoings - something that is often not easy to disproof).
From https://cuii.info/en/about-us/
The CUII was founded by Internet access providers and rightholders and coordinates the implementation of court blocking procedures and the enforcement of court blocking orders.
>A rights holder represented in the CUII can find copyright infringements and then file a lawsuit with the court for the implementation of a DNS block. If the court decides that a DNS block is lawful, this block is implemented by the Internet access providers organized in the CUII. The prerequisites for a blocking claim against the Internet access provider pursuant to § 8 DDG are met, - if a rights holder can prove his copyright, - his works are published on the Internet without his consent, - he has no other way of remedying the infringement, - if the blocking is reasonable and proportionate.
[0] https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/DE/Fachthemen/Digitales/Sch...
Why in heaven's name would anyone think that censorship is NOT super heavy-handed in Germany?
Does Germany have a recent or historical track record of EVER being a liberal-minded place?
In many cases, even investigative journalists cannot obtain details about governance processes and decisions made behind closed doors. The government often cites strict data protection rules and uses them as a shield against disclosure.
Another example: In Germany, you are generally not allowed to film law enforcement. If someone feels they have been treated "unfairly", good luck to prove that in court when two officers present a completely different version of events, especially since body cameras are very rare in germany.
At first sight, I don't see how the FOIA is much different to the Informationsfreiheitsgesetz (freedom of information law). https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informationsfreiheitsgesetz
Isn't the FOIA also applied on the federal level?
> In Germany, you are generally not allowed to film law enforcement
I think this is misleading. It's not especially prohibited. Generally, law enforcement enjoys the same rights as everyone else, that is having a right to privacy and the confidentiality of the spoken, non-public word. You can't film law enforcement folks preemptively, or without cause, if they have the reasonable expectation of confidentiality of the spoken word. If law enforcement is breaking the law, you are allowed to collect video evidence. In any case, you are not allowed to publish non-public video recordings or pictures of anyone, taken without explicit, or implicit consent. Public or non-public here means the implied confidentiality of communication, not necessarily where it happened. Eg. talking on a public street doesn't make every conversation public.
Mind you, in Germany, illegally obtained evidence isn't as easily dismissed as it is in the US. If you record the police without cause (illegally) and they happen to commit a crime, your recording isn't tainted evidence as far as I know, but rather you may (if indicted) face legal consequences yourself, independently. Again, publication is a completely different matter.
Legality of video recordings is pretty much irrelevant, regarding the legal power dynamics you described, as the police could just confiscate your phone and find some excuse for destroying the evidence. Independent oversight seems more important to address this.
On the other hand, I do think law enforcement should enjoy privacy, generally, as everyone else. I don't think, having a camera in your face with every interaction is helpful for anyone, all things considered, but would rather aid escalation and discourage leniency. Constant video surveillance just sucks, no matter who is doing the recording.
Once again someone spreading Russian FUD.
So let me flip the question: if a certain thing is illegal in a jurisdiction, but hosted outside, is it justified to block access to the hosting provider (notably, including Cloudflare and other giants)?
But if you applied it consistently, you'd have to admit that Germany, the US, and many other Western countries also engage in full-blown hybrid warfare, against their own populations.
Propaganda usually isn't banned, except in specific cases (defamation, hate speech, etc...). But AFAIK, RT is not special in that regard, it is just the kind of content one would expect from a website openly affiliated with Russian authorities.
There are people who see that as positive, because are used to be extremely careful and conscious of their words. But is a very thin line, where one word can obliterate your life as you know it.
The decision to classify something as propaganda should never be the role of a government, much less blocking it.
But that's something that's close to impossible for continental European cultures to ever understand, at a gut level.
The Russian propaganda spends a lot of resources on reinforcing high-minded ideals that provide a scaffolding for the intellectual types to climb on. The suckers and idiots fall for the more odious stuff.
For that matter, in most cases where RT has been linked to me, I couldn't see any clear way that the story advanced Russian interests, except perhaps by trying to paint the USA as full of internal social and cultural conflicts. But, frankly, American media does a pretty good job of that, too. (And many of those media outlets have also grossly misrepresented many events relevant to those conflicts — including ones where I know very well that they were misrepresented because I witnessed them first-hand. For example, I watched the Rittenhouse trial live-streamed, and then read media coverage describing something barely recognizable as what I just saw.)
(Besides, it's not like they're trying to hide that "rt" stands for Russia Today.)
It’s incredibly valuable to understand how the enemy thinks.
> In 1964, The Pawnbroker, directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Rod Steiger, was initially rejected because of two scenes in which the actresses Linda Geiser and Thelma Oliver fully expose their breasts; and a sex scene between Oliver and Jaime Sánchez, which it described as "unacceptably sex suggestive and lustful." ... On a 6–3 vote, the MPAA granted the film an "exception" conditional on "reduction in the length of the scenes which the Production Code Administration found unapprovable." The exception to the code was granted as a "special and unique case", and was described by The New York Times at the time as "an unprecedented move that will not, however, set a precedent."[63] The requested reductions of nudity were minimal, and the outcome was viewed in the media as a victory for the film's producers.[62] The Pawnbroker was the first film featuring bare breasts to receive Production Code approval. ...
See also https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5ix309/e... .
Honestly, wartime foreign media blocking is the only justified censorship type IMHO. Even then I would say that should be accessible with a delay. Why? Because media is is part of the tools in the war, up until the last day before the invasion Moscow officials on Twitter were mocking USA and other western leaders warning that Russia has troops build up and the invasion was imminent. The traditional Russian media was also writing articles about this. This was putting political pressure on the Western leaders, portraying them as warmongers reducing their credibility etc. Then suddenly one night Putin had 55min speech on why it was the West was the actual invaders and started the invasion. To this day, the Russian propaganda holds strong and awful lot of people are convinced that it is Russia who is facing invasion and is fighting bravely against the aggressors. Including the US administration since a few months.
On the other hand, complete permanent blocking also undermines populations assessment of the reality. As it turned out, the West wasn't also entirely truthful on the progress of the war and the effectiveness of the sanctions.
I don't know maybe we should have safeguards instead of censorship.
DNS are precisely a mechanism to find websites based on names, and a list of blocked websites would serve essentially as a DNS, so it's clearly circumventing the original purpose of the blocklist, asking for a list of the blocked websites is an oxymoron, publishing a website that displays that is an oxymoron, and the block of such a website is sensible.
>the “demagogue” who allows free expression is more of a tyrant than a state who blocks wrongthink
Okay
Communism did not work because it was not communist enough, now democracy is not working because it's not democratic enough. Democracy is the golden calf of westerners. I truly believe that voting rights are hurting more a society than drugs and alcohol.
They are struggling to figure out how to do this in the Information Age, but that doesn’t mean it’s not reasonable or important. Blocking propaganda posing as “news” is a stopgap measure, but we can’t do nothing if we want democracy to work.
