“As a digital association, the promotion of women and diversity is a key issue for eco in order to ensure the future viability of Germany as a digital location,” says Oliver Süme, Chair of the eco Association.

The German Bundestag will vote on the Passenger Transportation Act next Friday. eco urges policy-makers to not miss out on the opportunity for modern, climate-friendly mobility: With the Passenger Transportation Act’s planned return obligation and pre-order deadlines for rental cars, new inequities will be created for providers.

qbee AS helps customers to easily digitalise in the field of Industry 4.0 – with smart management and remote maintenance software for embedded Linux devices. In a short interview, Carsten Lehbrink, General Manager at qbee, reveals more about the Norwegian company, current challenges in the industry, and his expectations of eco.

With the call for unique and secure digital identities getting louder, Ekkehart Gerlach, Managing Director of the German ICT + Media Academy, predicts an increasing use of an ID card for the Internet, and reports on its many potential benefits.

“Politicians must pull the ripcord in order not to gamble away trust in digital communication,” says eco’s Vice-Chair Klaus Landefeld.

With an online event on 8 March, Salesforce and eco #LiT – Ladies in Tech are set to celebrate International Women’s Day and the 1st anniversary of Salesforce’s “Bring Women Back to Work” programme with great role models from the tech scene including Petra Jenner, Tijen Onaran, Donia Popa and Lucia Falkenberg. In advance of the event, we spoke with Petra Jenner of Salesforce about career opportunities for women in the tech industry and what tech companies can do to attract and retain more women.

The current draft of the BND Act by the German Federal Chancellery is set to give the German Federal Intelligence Service permission to access inventory, traffic and content data without the knowledge of the operator in question. The eco Association warns of the consequences of such a regulation for general IT security and judges the draft as being unconstitutional.

In this workshop we will show how the DNS Loadbalancer PowerDNS "dnsdist" can be used to extend any existing DNS resolver (BIND 9, Unbound, PowerDNS Recursor, Microsoft DNS etc.) with DoH and DoT. Existing DNS security mechanisms such as Response Policy Zones will be preserved.

An interview with Andreas Ocklenburg, CEO at cloudSME UG

The eco Association criticises procedure and warns against hasty decision in the Bundesrat – Password disclosure means profound invasion of privacy

Security of services, products and networks is taking on an increasingly important role in the digital sphere. The first EU-wide law on cybersecurity, the NIS Directive, came into force in 2016 and helped achieve a higher and more even level of security of network and information systems across the EU. With the recently...

The new German Telecommunications & Telemedia Data Protection Act (TTDSG) has now been adopted by the Federal Cabinet. In the international field, a proposal for the ePrivacy Regulation made under the Portuguese EU Council Presidency was presented to the EU’s deputy ambassadors on the same day. The eco Association calls for an approach which guarantees coherence and harmonisation between the TTDSG and the planned ePrivacy Regulation

In future, the German federal government wants to take tougher action against operators of criminal trading platforms on the Internet. To this end, the cabinet will discuss a corresponding draft of the Federal Ministry of Justice, which is to amend the German Criminal Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure accordingly.

“The new regulations on ancillary copyright for press publishers included in the latest draft law, in combination with the planned upload filters, will lead to a deep incision into freedom of expression and stunt the development of new and innovative platforms throughout the whole of Europe,” says eco Chair of the Board Oliver Süme.

Odix CEO & former commander of the IDF cyber defense unit, Dr. Oren Eytan will provide an overview of emerging cyber threats. Cyber-attacks become a major threat for every company regardless if it is small, medium or a large enterprise.

Leadinfo B. V. is a provider of lead generation software that identifies a company's B2B visitors on their own websites. The company, headquartered in Capelle aan den IJssel (Netherlands), was founded in 2017. In the short interview, Hagen Kiesewetter, Partner Manager DACH, explains, among other things, the special challenges of the industry and his expectations of eco.

Commenting on the German federal government’s Data Strategy presented today, eco Chair of the Board Oliver Süme says: “Standardised and legally secure handling of data is essential for all data-based business models, which is why the strategy now presented is long overdue and essentially a positive step forward for the companies concerned.”

eco – Association of the Internet Industry has taken on the specification of the GAIA-X Federation Services and has set up a Project Management Office (PMO) and defined five work packages. The German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi) is funding the project with around 13.5 million Euro.

Andreas Weiss, Head of Digital Business Models at the eco Association, explains in an interview why we need a trustworthy digital space that is consistently oriented towards European standards and values.

One year after the adoption of the EU Green Deal, leading cloud infrastructure providers and data centre operators in Europe have signed up to a joint Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact – with this including the Alliance for the Strengthening of Digital Infrastructures in Germany, founded under the umbrella of the eco Association.

Global leaders in the email industry came together in autumn 2020 for the CSA Digital Email Summit. Under the motto “Bridging the Gap – Reality vs. Expectations”, around 600 participants discussed the latest technologies and trends for sending commercial emails. Here is a summary of the Summit with links to the event reports.

In the planned amendment of the German Act against Restraints of Competition (GWB), the eco Association still sees clear grounds for criticism. In its third round, the GWB amendment is expected to be passed by the Bundestag next Thursday.

A good portion of interested participants, cherry-picked speakers, and two pinches of networking – that's all you need for the perfect online event. The right software also determines its success. In 2020, we as the eco Association digitalised around 100 events with a wide variety of online tools. Christiane Skiba, eco Branch Manager in Cologne and Head of Marketing, takes stock and gives valuable tips for the coming year.

In light of the attack on the U.S. Capitol, the German federal government plans to have the “repaired” version of the law on combating right-wing extremism and hate crime on the Internet confirmed by the Bundestag in an expedited procedure before the end of January. The eco Association views the events in Washington with the utmost gravity, but takes a critical stance on the expedited procedure for a law that has been deemed questionable under constitutional law.  

Andreas Weiss on Uptime Punks Podcast – offering an update on the GAIA-X project.

eco warns against unilaterally defining further requirements for social network operators at the national level until the interplay between the DSA and the German Network Enforcement Act has been conclusively regulated.

The year 2021 offers an opportunity for a strategic reorientation of German and European digital policy. Oliver Süme, Chair of the eco Association, calls for a more sustainable digital policy that sees digitalisation as part of the solution to many global challenges and uses existing innovation potential more consistently than before.

We should not sit back and relax. When eco, 25 years after its foundation, chose “Internet with responsibility” as our motto, we did not do so lightly. We are aware of the scope of our responsibility – and we believe in making a difference. We know that digital infrastructure is often critical infrastructure and that critical infrastructure is always a potential target for attack. If, in the middle of the pandemic, the IT systems of a major hospital were to be paralyzed by a (possibly even wrongly addressed) hacker attack, the damage will affect human lives.

Conclusions for sustainable digitalisation were adopted at last week’s meeting of the EU Environment Council. Among other things, these stipulate that data centres should become climate-neutral by 2030.

The Service-Meister Consortium announces it will unveil its 2020-developed platform architecture at the end of the year.  Service-Meister is developing innovations using AI to improve the service processes of SMEs.