Udo's Techblog

Here in Germany, we have a great tradition of not participating. Even though Germany is one of the world's top industrial nations, we're usually years behind in technology and new developments in general. We're slow to adapt to new trends, we're overly critical and dismissive, and when new ideas do become mainstream (against all odds, because of mounting external pressure) our lawmakers are always ready to legislate the hell out of those ideas until they're gone. Especially when it comes to the internet, we already have laws in place that make it dangerously unsafe both for users and especially for service providers to live without fear of prosecution - it seems you're always in violation of something. In Germany, innovation only happens in the interval between inception and the time it takes to make a law about it.

Although the German High Tech Sector is an often-evoked construct, it really consists of nothing more than a few biotech and mechanics companies doing some R&D (at least until their special fields become outlawed), which is usually the step that comes right before moving off production to more lucrative countries. This is of course, because we're also in the habit of taxing the living crap out of anything that moves.

We're arrogant, bitter, and downright hostile towards companies and people who take risks, who think differently, who are not in flow with the beaurocratic and paranoidly regulated culture that thrives on exclusion as well as the always-popular triumphing over people whom we perceive to be ideological outsiders.

In Germany, we believe people's heads will explode if they look at nude photos on Flickr. We believe this is a really serious issue when it comes to the protection of minors, because kids buying porn on street corners is that much better than the occasional youngster who lied about their age on their Flickr profile. As if Flickr was the number one unregulated porn site on the web, yeah right!

In Germany, we believe an email address must be traceable to a real person. We don't have any such safeguards and protection measure for our physical postal system, but we'll be damned if the state can't trace l33t@w00t.de to a postal address at its leasure any time. As if the IP address wasn't a pretty good clue in the first place, which by coincidence, we also require our ISPs to keep on record. As a result, Google Mail won't be available in Germany any longer. Just like many other services.

You think the worst scenario is some Nigerian kid stealing your credit card number? Well, there is a surprise in store for you! Who cares about the greatest continued privacy invasion of all time that's being executed quietly without any resistance. Between the U.S.'s advanced packet sniffing and Germany's massive "personal web habits" database, there are exactly zero mechanisms for citizen review or control of any kind.

And this is finally something where Germany clocks in at the forefront of development. Regulation-wise we're already somewhere between Singapore and Saudi Arabia. Tragically, I'd rather see some cool IT startups or maybe one or two biotech breakthroughs that don't disappear behind massive patent curtains for the next 20 years. Germany is removing itself from the creative genepool, and maybe that's a good thing, but I'm still sad.