Depublizieren
[1] Although the BBC has also reduced its online services to justify its license fee funding,[2] the Public-Value-Test used in the UK - the model for the German three-step test - only applies to major projects.
[1] Estimates of the total volume of older public service Internet content that has been decommissioned are more than one million online documents.
Earlier definitions of depublizieren as "unpublishing" referred to the removal of factually incorrect content from the Internet without comment instead of correction[13] or, as a technical term, to the withdrawal of a contribution visible on a website without its deletion from the repository.
This funding distorts competition and puts private companies at a disadvantage, especially since public broadcasters do not have a narrowly defined functional mandate for their activities, especially in the online sector.
According to this, public service broadcasting is to ensure the diversity of offerings and the reliability of information on the internet - it is attributed a "genuine online mandate".
"[19] The State Aid Compromise of 2007 between the Federal Republic of Germany and the EU Commission stipulated that "the functional mandate of the public broadcasters will be sufficiently specified" by June 1, 2009,[18] and in particular that its extension to online offerings will be defined.
According to Section 11d, Paragraph 2, RStV, exceptions apply, among other things, to soccer coverage of 1st and 2nd Bundesliga matches, which may only be available for 24 hours, and to archives "with contemporary and cultural history content", which may be online for an unlimited period.
[21] The restriction of soccer coverage is justified with "higher costs for the acquisition of additional rights"[21] for a longer on-demand option, which "should be avoided in the interest of the license fee payers".
Comments and economic data from private competitors (which are taken into account in the procedure but are not published) could, for example, state that "offers already on the market will be completely crowded out",[18] which would affect the second three-step test criterion.
Based on the culturally 'learned' broadcasting week, the so-called 'seven-day catch-up' has established itself as the minimum supply period in many European countries, especially with regard to video use.
Private media companies and publishers' associations were less critical of ZDF than of ARD, which is much more complexly organized with a total of 37 three-stage tests.
The new legal regulations were criticized with combative terms such as "Morgenthau Plan" or "censorship", while private publishers often used the catchword "electronic press" for the online offerings of the broadcasters.
[32] After the completion of the Telemedia concepts in the summer of 2010, the length of time that various television genres remained in the media libraries and the deletion of online contributions became much-discussed topics "that arouse the ire of Internet users and are ostentatiously regretted by those responsible at the broadcasters.
[36] When the first articles disappeared from their online offerings, the editorial teams of the public broadcasters were initially confronted with questions about the supposed deletion of websites.
"[38]The coverage of the three-stage review process was so negative in the spring of 2010 that the Conference of Commission Chairmen of the Association of State Media Authorities felt compelled to complain about the poor quality of reporting.
[39] Among other things, "abbreviated, incorrect and one-sided"[39] reports were made from confidential documents, giving "the impression that the committees are avoiding transparency in a quasi-autocratic and interest-driven manner.
[39] At the same time, however, the influence of lobbying by publishers and private broadcasters has already been pointed out, in whose interests the extensive curtailment of public service online activities is taking place, although they are not satisfied with the result.
[44] In July 2010, at the same time as the decision-making phase for the Telemedia concepts, the now defunct website www.depublizieren.de was created as a protest against depublizieren, containing a fictitious death notice for "Die Publizierung".
[2] The depublizieren of public Internet content received a new wave of public attention after the implementation of concepts developed for this purpose in September 2010: After an archive of tagesschau.de articles written between 1999 and 2010 had already been offered on the BitTorrent download portal The Pirate Bay in July 2010, the website depub.org put preparation of this archived content online for free retrieval on August 20, 2010, so that users could similarly access the articles to the version on tagesschau.de before depublication.
[49] Dagmar Gräfin Kerssenbrock, a CDU politician from Schleswig-Holstein and chairwoman of the NDR broadcasting council, called depub.org "an example of the creative anarchy on the Internet"[53] and of the great interest in the content of tagesschau.de.
[53] The Tagesschau online editorial team suspects that the contents of the anonymously registered domain depub.org in Canada were collected while the articles, which have now been published, were still publicly accessible.
[53] However, according to tagesschau.de editor-in-chief Jörg Sadrozinski, the illegal use of tagesschau.de articles by depub.org could lead to "politicians or lobbyists in publishing houses realizing that such measures are simply pointless, that the Internet never forgets".
[55] On July 1, 2014, the Berlin House of Deputies called on the Senate to review the practice, which had been in place for five years, and to abolish the obligation to depublish.
[57] Since May 2019, public broadcasters have been allowed to develop new digital offerings, provided they are based on a concept approved by the supervisory bodies.
[59][58] In a joint open letter to the ZDF Television Council, the GEW trade union, the German Library Association, and Wikimedia, among others, called for a rethink.
