Computer & Communication Industry Association

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

PublishedApril 18, 2023
Written By
  • 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.

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Research
January 6, 2026

Repealing Section 230 Would Cost Americans Over $2.2 Trillion

Section 230 of the Communications Act (Section 230) importantly places legal accountability on communicators of speech, rather than those who merely publish it. It also allows digital services to safe...
  • Content Moderation
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Research
December 15, 2025

Fair Use in the U.S. Economy – 2025 Edition

A range of exceptions to copyright protection under U.S. law, classified here under the broad heading of fair use, sustain companies that represent nearly one-fifth of total U.S. GDP. This study fi...

    Copyright
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Research
November 18, 2025

2025 Survey of Product Impact in the Connected Economy: Artificial Intelligence

The CCIA Research Center's 2025 Survey of Product Impact in the Connected Economy: Artificial Intelligence finds that generative AI is the most rapidly adopted general purpose technology in history...

  • Digital Economy
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Research
October 28, 2025

UK Live Streaming Survey Results

A new survey of UK residents finds that livestreaming has become one of the UK’s most valued and socially engaging forms of digital media, worth more than £17 billion (US$23 billion) annually to...

    Emerging Technology
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