Government Mandates to Remove Content Are Ineffective, Costly, and Anti-Competitive

April 18, 2023

Trevor Wagener
Kara Cade

The CCIA Research Center’s ex post cost-benefit analysis of Germany’s Network Enforcement Act (Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz or NetzDG), a model for such policies, finds that in 2022, NetzDG resulted in just 5,138 incremental content takedowns at four leading social media sites with trillions of instances of user-generated content annually. As startups have fewer resources to spend on compliance and because there are economies of scale in compliance with NetzDG-like policies, barriers to entry result.

Read Download

More From The Research Center

October 3, 2023 Stats

The State of Competition in UK Cloud Computing

While the demand for cloud services keeps growing globally and consumers and businesses are presented with a variety of almost custom-made cloud solutions, it is important to ensure that any barrie...

September 5, 2023 Reports

Hate Speech & Digital Ads: The Impact of Harmful Content on Brands

Data from two independently-administered survey experiments demonstrates significant likely damage to both websites and advertisers from harmful content like hate speech, suggesting that "must-carr...

July 10, 2023 Reports

Apocalypse Not: The Resilience of Retail SMBs in the 2010s

This study finds that small and medium-sized retail businesses (SMBs) experienced a period of resurgence and growth in the 2010s. Empirical analyses suggest a direct link between growth of retail S...

May 1, 2023 Stats

Social Media Survey Experiment

This survey shows the impact of objectionable user-generated content on social media sites and digital advertising. The experiment results find that content like hate speech, offensive material, mi...