Which is why Germany has one of the best infrastructures, both physical and electronic, in the Western world?
If there is such a thing as a most right stereotype, it's how the Silicon Valley worshiping non-Americans on HN deny the successes and strengths of their own country.
Germany is a, if not the leading country in industrial standardization, and especially in the current climate most of the world will prefer to follow Germany's lead over the politically and ideologically compromised American industry.
The infrastructure is from another timeframe (pre-2000, often pre-1990) - like elsewhere. The roads, and telephone copper&fiber cables last a long time, with maintenance.
FWIW there is a prime time television show about unnecessary and failed public projects in Germany. Germany has worse Internet infrastructure than many, if not most, of its European neighbours. Merkel once famously said "Das Internet ist für uns alle Neuland" (The internet is new ground for all of us) and finally outed the government as antiquated. The achievements Germany made in industralization are fading away. Even basic infrastructures like streets are steadily rotting which was definitely not the case 10-20 years ago.
To tangentially answer your question (with only little relation to the rest of the thread), we're getting old much the way Japan does, and we're doing very little to help it. The average German is 45, ageing to 50 in the next 15 years. This has direct consequences on the political discourse, choosing a status quo mentality over the innovative stance we used to have.
I didn't know there was ever a real thing named De-Mail. I named a fictional email-like service De-Mail, in my book The Dread Space Pirate Richard. it's closer to Reddit than email, however.
My take on De-Mail was that of a forum & messaging system where you can never be sure if anything you see or hear in it is true or honest or factual, in whole or in part, but at least it's entertaining or stimulating, and that's what mattered most! there's a major comedy piece written around it.
Surprised not to see comments in here about the use of international standards to fix markets in the favor of one country's exports (versus another's) and for the associated backdooring of technology and standards.
"The agencies, the documents reveal, have adopted a battery of methods in their systematic and ongoing assault on what they see as one of the biggest threats to their ability to access huge swathes of internet traffic – "the use of ubiquitous encryption across the internet".
"Simultaneously, the N.S.A. has been deliberately weakening the international encryption standards adopted by developers. One goal in the agency’s 2013 budget request was to “influence policies, standards and specifications for commercial public key technologies,” the most common encryption method." - http://www.propublica.org/article/the-nsas-secret-campaign-t...
The Snowden leaks themselves have the GCHQ congratulating the NSA in frank terms for controlling and exporting international standards, noting how it has driven great gains for the US.
Given that Germany was one of the victims (including the companies mentioned in the article) of standards-based cryptographic subvertion - the only suprise in this article was that it took Germany this long to announce their own initiative.
One can also surmise this as an indicator that the NSA is back to the usual and that IoT standards are being actively influenced for sabotage.
> For machines to communicate over the web–essentially sending data from sensors back and forth from cloud-based servers—there needs to be a standard software protocol.
For IoT in general, there will be very fragmented protocols.
For _industrial_ use cases, the clear winner is IEC62541, aka OPC Unified Automation [1]. There is no real alternative, so that issue is basically already settled.
And from a technical point of view, its actually quite good.
Not everything that needs interoperability can, nor should, use HTTP/HTML. For me, IoT includes very small devices still with only a few K of RAM, and requiring an HTTP/HTML stack in amongst everything else will just serve to push up prices and add needless complexity.