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Simultaneously, conservative politicians whom appear to be noticeably clueless about the Internet, such as Family Minister Ursula von der Leyen and Minister for Economic Affairs Michael Glos, are trying to install a nationwide infrastructure for Internet censorship. The plan of the German conservative party CDU includes obligating service providers to install filtering systems. Companies selling Internet routers offer service providers such devices to “optimize bandwidth usage”. It is not yet widely known that they can easily be used for the censorship of any given piece of content on the Internet. If those “censorship devices” become widely used, complete censorship of unpopular or oppositional content will become easy to implement. Then the only relevant question will be who is going to manage the censorship lists – and by what standards.
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