On April 17, 2026, Germany's Federal Ministry of Justice published the draft Act to Strengthen Civil and Criminal Protection Against Digital Violence (Gesetz gegen digitale Gewalt). Presented by Justice Minister Dr. Stefanie Hubig, the bill does something the German government resisted for nearly a decade: it dismantles the enforcement logic of the 2017 Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG) and rebuilds online-abuse remedy around courts rather than platforms. Public consultation closed on May 22, 2026, and the government expects the law to take effect later this year, retiring NetzDG's last surviving provisions as the German DSA implementation (DDG) takes over the rest.
From platform-policing to judicial process
Start with the strongest case for acting. Digital violence is, as Hubig put it, "a mass phenomenon": sexualized deepfakes, doxing, coordinated harassment, and GPS-stalking inflict real harm, and NetzDG never gave victims a workable remedy. It told platforms to delete "manifestly unlawful" content within 24 hours under threat of fines up to €50 million — yet it left the individual victim with no way to identify an anonymous abuser or hold them personally accountable. A court-centered model is a genuine answer to that gap.
It is also, paradoxically, better for free speech. NetzDG's defining flaw was that it deputized private companies as speech police and then penalized only under-removal, never over-removal. The rational response was to delete first and ask questions never — the over-blocking incentive civil-liberties groups warned about from the start. The new draft inverts this. As Morrison Foerster notes, the bill establishes a "court-centric civil enforcement regime" in which judges, not risk-averse moderation pipelines, decide what comes down. Removing the standing deletion mandate and routing disputes through proportionality review is the opposite of censorship-by-proxy. On that axis, this is a real improvement.
What the draft actually requires
The obligations now attach to court orders, not standing platform duties. Per the Ministry's press release, providers can be ordered to disclose a user's identity through a new two-stage judicial procedure — a court first compels the platform to surrender an IP address, then compels the access provider to surrender subscriber details (name, date of birth, address, email "if available"), as heise online reports. Providers can be ordered to preserve evidence for the duration of proceedings, and — as a described "last resort" — a court may order temporary suspension of an account for severe, repeat violations.
The draft also closes substantive criminal gaps, adding three offenses to the Criminal Code: § 184k (non-consensual intimate imagery, including deepfake pornography), § 201b (AI-generated realistic depictions that damage reputation, punishable by up to two years), and § 202e (covert GPS tracking). These are targeted, conduct-specific crimes — the proportionate way to address harm, far preferable to broad content mandates.
The DSA collision
The trouble is what survives from NetzDG. The draft retains the obligation — once § 5 NetzDG — for non-EU social networks to appoint a domestic service agent, on pain of fines up to €500,000, rising to €5 million for legal entities, per Baker McKenzie's analysis. And the account-suspension power sits uneasily beside EU law: heise flags the tension with Article 23 of the Digital Services Act, which conditions account restrictions on the "frequent" provision of "manifestly illegal content" — a higher bar than the German draft's suspension trigger.
This is the structural problem. The DSA is a maximum-harmonization instrument built on the country-of-origin principle: a platform is regulated primarily where it is established, not in every member state that wishes to bolt on bespoke rules. A nationally imposed agent mandate plus member-state-specific suspension grounds is exactly the fragmentation the DSA was meant to end. Morrison Foerster observes that the draft tries to thread this needle by framing obligations as case-specific judicial orders rather than general regulatory duties — but whether Brussels and the Court of Justice accept that distinction is far from certain. Germany has been here before: the Commission already forced NetzDG amendments over single-market conflicts.
A regime only as good as its courts
A judge-centered system also relocates the bottleneck. The promise of due process is worthless if victims cannot reach the courthouse. HateAid — a victims'-advocacy group that supports the bill's goals — warns that affected users face "prohibitively high costs" to bring the new proceedings. The German Judges Association cautions that understaffed prosecutors and courts cannot absorb the added caseload. A remedy that is real on paper but unaffordable in practice helps no one, and risks discrediting the better model it represents.
The proportionate read
Germany has the architecture right and the calibration wrong. Moving online-speech adjudication from corporate moderation queues to courts is the single most pro-speech reform the country could make to its post-NetzDG framework, and the new criminal offenses are appropriately narrow. But the residual extraterritorial agent mandate, the €5 million fine, and member-state-specific suspension powers reintroduce the very fragmentation the DSA was designed to eliminate — and the whole edifice rests on courts the government has not resourced to carry it. Berlin should keep the judicial pivot, drop the parts that pick a fight with EU law, and fund the benches meant to make the promise good. Get that right, and Germany could model what proportionate, rights-respecting online-abuse enforcement actually looks like.