On September 17, 2026, Education and Family Minister Karin Prien (CDU) endorsed the European Commission's proposal to bar under-13s from social media and limit 13-15 year olds to supervised access. She also said Germany will present key points for its own interim legislation in October instead of waiting for EU agreement, according to a dpa report carried by Yahoo News. Germany's first platform-governance law, the NetzDG, is gone, and this would be the first major national platform statute to follow it.
The case for acting now
The strongest argument for Prien's approach is practical. Children are on platforms that were built for adults, and the design features that hold attention, such as endless scrolling and autoplay, are not illegal speech, so notice-and-takedown rules cannot reach them. Waiting for a 27-state EU consensus could take years. A national bridge law that covers smaller platforms and gaps in youth-protection and criminal law is a reasonable answer to that delay, and it puts responsibility on platforms, which Prien describes as bearing primary responsibility for protecting minors.
From NetzDG to the DDG
The NetzDG was Germany's 2017 attempt to force large platforms to remove unlawful content quickly. It was replaced when the Digitale-Dienste-Gesetz (DDG) entered into force on May 14, 2024, implementing the EU Digital Services Act. The Bundesnetzagentur became Germany's Digital Services Coordinator, with power to seek fines of up to 6% of annual turnover for systematic violations. Its president said the aim is a safer, fairer and more transparent internet. The agency does not decide what content is legal. That stays with courts and other authorities.
The Bundestag passed the implementing law on March 21, 2024, with SPD, Greens and FDP in favor and CDU/CSU and AfD against. The lesson is that Germany's platform rules now sit inside an EU framework. A national interim law on minors therefore has to fit the DSA's harmonized structure, or it invites the same legal conflict that national measures have faced elsewhere in Europe.
What the proposals contain
The Commission's tiers, as reported by dpa, bar under-13s from platforms such as TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat. Ages 13-15 get "mini-accounts" with parental supervision and a daily limit of one hour. Design restrictions on endless scrolling, autoplay and screen time would apply. Prien wants verification through an app that follows data-protection rules and minimizes the data collected, and eventually through the EU ID wallet.
That builds on the June 2026 report of Germany's expert commission on child and youth protection in the digital world. As heise reports, the commission made 56 recommendations and did not reduce the problem to a single age limit. Its core idea is safety by design: an account for adolescents "must simply look and function differently than one for adults," in the words of co-chair Nadine Schön. It also criticized common verification methods that evaluate biometrics or infer age from behavioral data, because they risk privacy and discrimination. It recommended device-level verification only and rejected centralized identity databases.
Where the design is proportionate, and where it is not
The safety-by-design core is the most defensible part. It regulates product features and does not police speech, so it avoids the over-removal problem that critics raised against the NetzDG. It also fits the DSA.
The weaker points are the hard age gate and the one-hour cap. A fixed daily limit for 13-15 year olds is a blunt tool. It treats a teenager reading news or organizing a school project the same as one scrolling short video. The Electronic Frontier Foundation makes a related First Amendment argument against California's SB 976, which requires parental permission before teens see recommended content. EFF says that burden falls on young people's ability to read and comment on the news, discuss politics and share art. Germany is not bound by the First Amendment. Its Basic Law does protect expression and information rights, including for minors, and the same trade-off applies.
EFF also points to a narrower alternative: limit invasive data collection and cross-service tracking, which protects all users while respecting speech. That option is worth weighing against a supervised-access tier.
What the interim law should do
- Keep verification on the device. The expert commission's device-level, no-central-database position should be written into the statute, not left to guidance. An age check that builds a registry of who uses which platform creates a privacy risk that outweighs the child-safety gain.
- Tie the law to the DSA. Enforcement should run through the Bundesnetzagentur and existing DSA duties so smaller platforms are not exposed to 16 different regimes.
- Sunset it. If the EU rules arrive, the national law should expire or fold in automatically.
- Measure outcomes. Publish evidence on whether design rules reduce harm before adding stricter limits.
The interim law's details will emerge in October. If it puts design obligations on platforms and keeps age verification private and on the device, it can be a proportionate model. If it relies on centralized checks or blanket time caps, it will repeat the NetzDG's core mistake of pushing an open-ended burden onto users and platforms without proof that it works.