We use cookies to improve our service for you. You can find more information in our data protection declaration. German internet providers have grudgingly agreed to block websites containing child pornography. Critics say their deal with the government won't make much of a difference. Five of Germany's eight major internet service providers - Deutsche Telekom's T-Online, Vodafone's Arcor, Kabel Deutschland, Telefonica's O2 and Alice's Hansenet - signed the legally binding agreement with the government and the Federal Crime Office on Friday, agreeing to install software to block consumer access to child pornography sites.
The five companies together cover around 75 percent of the German market. In future, due to the software blocks installed by the internet service providers, consumers attempting to click on blacklisted websites are to be automatically redirected to a red stop sign.
The Federal Crime Office has compiled the blacklist of 1, sites, which it updates daily. The online companies have six months to reprogram thousands of servers and install the page blockers. The government expects that, once these are in place, up to , attempts to access child pornography sites will be blocked daily. It is modeled on similar action taken years ago in Scandinavia, Britain and Italy. The law is also intended to make it harder for criminals to profit from distributing banned pedophile material.
They say they do not want to take the risk of breaching the telecommunications secrecy law by blocking child pornography sites.
They also argue that they only provide the technical capacity to distribute information and are not responsible for content that flows through their networks. Limiting access to information is a sensitive subject in Germany because of its Nazi past and East German Communist rule, but von der Leyen said protecting children was the priority.
