Germany's private internet censorship organization gives up

Our internet is a little freer now, with less censorship by private companies.

What was the CUII?

The Clearingstelle Urheberrecht im Internet (CUII) is a private group formed by ISPs and copyright holders. They decided what websites to block, and ISPs followed, without any court ruling. No judge was involved, no legal process.

The members: The four largest ISPs in Germany and a bunch of copyright holders (the Motion Picture Association, Sky, ...). If they decided that a site should be blocked, the ISPs just blocked the domains from being resolved. This ran completely outside the courts, a private system made by corporations for censorship. Blocked sites included streaming services, but also sites like Sci-Hub or game piracy sites.

What we did

In a previous blog post, I went into detail on how we trolled them:
- We leaked their secret blocklists (the list of domains was kept secret!)
- We exposed dozens of wrongful and outdated blocks.
- We made them unblock a lot of domains, including some that were blocked for years.
- ... and so much more. We just made a lot of bad press for them.

What changed

The CUII now only coordinates blocks between ISPs after a court order. That's it. No more secret votes. No more corporate censorship. The new version of their website says: "The CUII coordinates the conduct of judicial blocking proceedings and the implementation of judicial blocking orders."

It's a massive shift. Until now, corporations acted like they were above the law with the CUII, deciding on their own what content to block across the entire German internet, based purely on their financial interests. That's over. From now on, the new "Code of Conduct" requires actual legal review for new blocks to be implemented. The old process, where rights holders submitted requests and the CUII panel approved them privately, is gone.
Instead, they now say: "Under the current Code of Conduct, judicial review of blocking claims replaces these procedural steps (the CUII's old internal decision-making process). The CUII no longer reviews blocking claims, but instead coordinates only the initiation and conduct of proceedings, the implementation of judicial blocking decisions, and the unblocking of domains that are no longer infringing."

In practice, this means the CUII no longer decides anything. It just forwards court decisions and tells ISPs what to do. The version of the CUII that privately censored the internet is dead. It's now rather just coordinating everything so stuff goes smoothly. That's not because they wanted to change. It's because they had to. Even the Bundesnetzagentur (Germany's Federal Network Agency) told them to back off and leave the decisions to actual courts (I reported a lot of the CUII's wrongful blocks to them). It's a step back toward net neutrality and due process. Censorship decisions should never be made by a few companies behind closed doors.

Sadly, there's a small catch: the old blocks stay. The current blocklist still includes every site they decided to censor before now, without court orders. But at least, this mess won't grow anymore. We exposed them, we pushed back against their private censorship, and it seems like we won.

The core problem with the CUII was always that that it was a private organization, bypassing courts, letting powerful corporations decide what Germans are allowed to access online. This power finally no longer belongs to them, but now rightfully belongs in court, which is a long overdue step. They are not above the law, and they never should have been.

You can read an article in German about this: https://netzpolitik.org/2025/die-cuii-gibt-auf-fuer-netzsperren-braucht-es-jetzt-einen-gerichtsentscheid/