German Bundestag Meets Innovation

He copied the text of his speech to his iPad device, took the apparatus with him to the speaker's desk on the floor of the plenary hall of the Bundestag, and read aloud his text as planned. The acting chair of the session did not intervene.

However, Mr Schulz's behaviour did not remain unnoticed. Immediately after closing his speech, a discussion started, first in the ranks of his MP colleagues, then in the media and in the public: How on earth could this man dare to take a computer - even with full Internet connectivity, who knows? - into the plenary hall of German Bundestag - despite the fact that parliamentary by-laws require that MP enter the hall only without such sort of evil equipment? The Select Committee on by-laws of the Bundestag will talk about possible consequences of this 'misconduct' of a MP officially in one of its next sessions.

It should be understood that any distraction of MPs from the Official proceedings by carrying, flipping through and reading newspapers or paper files is perfectly legal.

Then there was another event earlier this week. Mr Thomas de Maizière, German Home Secretary, has held an important speech on "Basics of common Internet politics of the future" outlining general lines of Internet regulation as intended by the current Government. Well, I won't discuss here the oddity of the fact that the outline of the future Internet regulation is presented by the Home Secretary, not by a Minister of Justice or by a Minister for Technology and Research.

I think it is worrying that the German word "gefahrgeneigt" appears no less than 5 times in Mr de Maizière's speech. There seems to be no proper English translation for this very German word. It means that something you do is likely to cause harm to others, like fiddling around with hazardous chemistry. It is used mainly in a legal context e.g. to justify extended rules of liability. For example, if you keep a dog, German law says that doing so is some sort of activity which is "gefahrgeneigt" because of the dog might bite any third party at any time, and, hence, the laws governing liability for biting dogs are stricter than those for e.g. operating a refrigerator in your kitchen.

Mr de Maizière's speech has been hailed as to its softened tones; the Minister avoided to denounce the entire Internet outright as gomorrah and den of vice. But his announcements were quite cloudy and went without significant details. And, with regard to five aspects of the Internet, he used the term "gefahrgeneigt". This means that despite recognisable attempts to overcome signs of luddism exhibited by his predecessors in Office, Mr de Maizière sees the Internet and the digital world in its entirety in the first place as a source of perils and then, in the second line, maybe, also as a chance.

Both 'happenings' of this week, a MP getting mildly scandalised for just using a digital gadget to read his speech, and a Minister dwelling on how "gefahrengeneigt" the Internet is, have shed a sharp light on why the innovative digital world of the future is shaped elsewhere, mainly in the United States, and not in Europe, let alone in Germany.

(Photo: (C) 2006 by escpeapalumni via Flickr licensed under the terms of a CC license)