Joana Cotar
Internet Governance Forum
German Bundestag,
November 14, 2019, Plenarprotokoll 19/127, pp. 15939-15940
[Joana Cotar is an
Alternative für Deutschland Bundestag member from the central German state of
Hessen. She is the AfD’s Bundestag spokesman for digital policy. Duden is the
name of a German dictionary. Johann Nestroy is a 19th Century Austrian playwright and actor.]
Right honorable Frau President. Worthy
colleagues.
At the end of November, the Internet
Governance Forum will be held in Berlin. Internet experts from around the world
will together discuss political, legal and technical questions of the internet –
a fine thing actively attended to by the Digital Agenda Committee.
The CDU/CSU and the SPD now use this event
for a motion entitled: “…Internet Governance Forum for an open and free global
internet.” You will forgive that I must laugh at this title, worthy colleagues
of the coalition. It just so happens that you, the party that in past years has
wantonly driven forward the attack on internet freedom, now demand a free and
global internet. That’s a lot of chutzpah! It happens that you, the originator of
the NetzDG and the expediter of the upload filter say you want to maintain the
free internet. How impudent can one actually be? You present here a show window
motion which sounds nice and which shall deceive the citizens: “Look, we pay
attention to you, we fight for freedom” and in reality you do the exact
opposite.
Kirsten
Tackmann (Linke): You know about that!
For example, the Internet Enforcement Law
[NetzDG]: A mostly unconstitutional law which like no other reduces internet
freedom of opinion. So as not to risk being blocked, or the dissolution of
their own profiles, many people no longer write what they think.
Tankred
Schipanski (CSU/CSU): Ridiculous, Frau colleague.
Recent studies indicate that the majority of
Germans feel that the freedom of opinion is narrowed, that concerning specific
issues one must calculate what one says. Never in my life would I have thought
that in a free and democratic country like Germany that once again things could
go so far.
We have in recent weeks celebrated the 30th
anniversary of the fall of the Wall. Instead of learning from history, there is
celebrated in Germany the regime of denunciation and the resurrection of
censorship.
But know that some employ your marvelous law
as a model: authoritarian regimes like Venezuela, Vietnam, Belarus, Russia or
Honduras, which have copied the NetzDG and use it as a disguise for the censorship
and suppression of their own citizens. “Hearty congratulations” one can only
say! We have a new export contender. I hope you’re proud of yourselves.
We of the AfD already in December 2017
presented a draft law for the abrogation of the NetzDG. It was now for the
fifth time stricken from the committee’s orders of business after it was
already in 2018 set aside umpteen times. You do not wish to occupy yourselves
with that because for you the current curtailment of freedom of opinion does not
go far enough. You are already working on an intensification of the NetzDG.
Gobbledygook shall provide the required leeway so that disfavored expressions
of opinion may be persecuted.
Do you know when I first encountered the term
Hetze [agitation]? My father, during
the rule of Ceausescu in Romania, was sentenced to twelve years imprisonment – because
he allegedly agitated against the state. Do you notice something, ladies and
gentlemen? Do you notice what happens when politics determines what Hetze is?
The NetzDG again emerges in the new UN report of the commissioners
for freedom of opinion – as a negative example. It was vaguely formulated and
leads to over-blocking. The associated business pressure leads automatically to
the employment of upload filters, technologies that block content even before
it is loaded on a platform.
And thus we are at the second theme: upload filter. Before the
vote at the EU level, internet pioneers like the founder of the World Wide Web,
Tim Berners-Lee, publicly appealed to the members of the EU. Upload filters would
be used as “a tool for the automatic surveillance and control of the user.”
Platforms would be forced to embed an “infrastructure for surveillance and
censorship deep in their networks.” You took no interest in that. The principle
proponent of the upload filter was Axel Voss, a member of the CDU. Katharina
Barley of the SPD voted for it. And you now actually complain in your motion that
the open and free internet is under world-wide threat – right, from you, dear
representatives of the government parties. So you ought not to point a finger
at Russia and China; three fingers are pointing back at you.
Your present motion provokes in me utter scorn. That the
government parties now demand from the government – that is, from their own
people, a rapid construction of the internet – in addition to 24 further demands
– because the government, thus their own people, for years did not do their
homework on digitization matters, for me, rounds out the absurdity.
The FDP motion on the contrary goes in the right direction:
maintenance of freedom of opinion, end-to-end encoding, not terminal encoding,
for internet protocols, no backdoors or zero-day-exploits. The AfD already in
May of this year demanded that in its motion “Freedom on the Internet –
Strengthen Citizens’ Rights.”
Manuel Höferlin
(FDP): Us too! Long ago!
That’s nice that we agree on that, dear colleagues. The coalition
on the other hand should once again look up in Duden the term “freedom.” Perhaps
a quote from Nestroy may help them:
Censorship is the active admission of
the mighty that they are capable of governing only stupefied slaves…but not a
free people.
Many thanks.
[Translated by Todd Martin]
