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

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.