[luckylion]

> Funny though how Germans turn blind eye on their own oligopolies dominating and devastating European markets.

Everybody wants sellers to compete when they're buying, nobody wants to compete when they're selling.

> For them internet is whether "stupid websites", a medium serving copyrights violations, or legal compliance issue (see "Impressum" hysteria).

The large corporations and media companies had issues with the laws around imprints? That wasn't my perception at all. Rather, it was average people who wrote blogs etc who didn't want to put their real name, home address and tax IDs onto their sites for various reasons, but the law was so vague that nobody was sure their site wasn't "similar to the press" or "with commercial interest". Larger companies didn't care at all -- they were generally compliant way before that law was introduced.

[durnygbur]

> Larger companies didn't care at all -- they were generally compliant way before that law was introduced.

If you write anything on the internet you're publishing content, ie. media might start consider you a competition, certainly after achieving certain visibility. Why not create an easy way to shot someone down or to suck someone into an expensive time consuming legal swamp?

[luckylion]

Oh, I misunderstood your comment, I believe. I took it to mean that the companies got into a craze about new requirements, not that they were welcoming the new requirements as it gave them some/more control over online publishing (which is how I understand your comment now, please correct me if I'm wrong).

I generally agree in that case, they were probably happy for that moat.