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In a decision of 23 June 2020, the German Bundesgerichtshof (Federal Supreme Court – BGH), the highest civil court in Germany, provisionally upheld the charge that Facebook had abused a dominant market position. The Bundeskartellamt (Federal Cartels Office), which is responsible for competition-related matters in Germany, had previously prohibited social media provider Facebook from processing data captured during Internet use outside the Facebook platform without the users’ specific consent. Under the BGH’s decision, the prohibition notice can now be enforced. The case concerns...

In a ruling of 15 July 2020 (Case no. BVerwG 6 C 25.19), the German Bundesverwaltungsgericht (Federal Administrative Court – BVerwG) ended a longstanding dispute over a change of licence for German TV broadcaster SAT.1 by rejecting a complaint by two German regulators against another German regulator as inadmissible. It ruled that a regional media authority did not have legal standing to revoke a licence granted by another regional media authority to a private broadcaster for a national television channel. The licence granted to Sat.1 was therefore lawful. Private broadcasters in Germany...

The Bundesverfassungsgericht (Federal Constitutional Court – BVerfG) strengthened the freedom of the press in two judgments issued on 23 June 2020. Although the cases dealt with very different issues, in both decisions the BVerfG highlighted the importance of protecting a free press in the context of democratic opinion-forming. In the first case (no. 1 BvR 1716/17), a constitutional complaint had been filed against a criminal conviction imposed after an unpixelated image of a dark-skinned patient in a university hospital waiting room was forwarded to a newspaper. The photographer had ignored...

On 27 July 2020, the German Bundesgerichtshof (Federal Supreme Court – BGH) issued two decisions on the “right to be forgotten”, which gives people the right to have their personal information deleted by data processors such as search engine operators after a certain period of time. However, the right does not apply without restriction, but depends on a series of factors that need to be weighed up. This is demonstrated by both BGH decisions, in which one claim was rejected while the other was submitted to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). The first procedure...

On 19 May 2020, Germany’s Kommission für Jugendmedienschutz (Committee for the protection of minors in the media – KJM) announced that it had approved another age verification system (AVS module). The ‘Robo-Ident’ module developed by Nect GmbH is a so-called partial solution for the age verification of closed user groups. It identifies people using an automated biometric data comparison process. Such partial age verification solutions can be built into the general youth protection concepts used by different content providers. In practical terms, the system enables...