Preventive State Intervention in Mass Media Internet Communication

A point of departure for these considerations is the blocking decree of the Düsseldorf regional government against various access providers in Northrhine-Westfalia. After unsuccessful action against the content provides of an illegal Internet offering, there exists as a second step the possibility of obliging the access provider to block the content in question. This measure, merely reactive – and with that to be regarded as permissible censorship after the fact – could, however, be possibly considered as improper censorship or as a measure tantamount to censorship, on the basis of the particular circumstances existing in the internet, for instance, as regards the process of reception and publication. In the literature, initiatives are discernable, which support correspondingly extending the concept of censorship and accommodating it to new media offerings.