Foreword
Author | Christian Walter |
Pages | 2-3 |
FRONTIERS OF LAW IN CHINA
VOL. 13 SEPTEMBER 2018 NO. 3
DOI 10.3868/s050-007-018-0021-0
SPECIAL ISSUE
PARADIGMS OF INTERNET REGULATION IN THE EUROPEAN UNION AND CHINA
FOREWORD
Christian Walter*
When we Europeans look out for inspiration regarding our regulations of the internet
and internet-based services, our eyes usually turn to the west, across the Atlantic. Our
internet economy is dominated by large US companies that seem to blossom in the United
States in an apparently very innovation-friendly regulatory climate, and some voices
would therefore like European legislators to occasionally “take a leaf out of the book” of
American regulations. At the same time, the recurring scandals surrounding the
surveillance of American companies by their domestic secret services, but also the
excessive and sometimes manipulative processing of data by those companies themselves,
reinforce the more “conservative” European approach, which puts more emphasis on
protecting the privacy of European Union citizens. Against this background, it is certainly
justified and necessary to compare American and European concepts of internet
regulation. It seems unfortunate, however, that other concepts are almost completely lost
sight of. Little is known about the structures of internet regulation in the People’s
Republic of China, for example, whose internet community, which now has over 730
million users, is likely to have a similar volume as the combined user figures in the
European Union and the United States. Almost unnoticed, huge internet companies such
as Alibaba and Tencent (with the popular service WeChat), Baidu and DiDi have emerged
there. These companies bear many similarities with the great American tech giants and
evoke comparable regulatory needs.
I am therefore very pleased that a group of young academics from the Law Faculty of
the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich have used the funding opportunities of the
International Office of the University to seek exchange with Chinese scholars from the
Renmin University of China Law School and to create a basis for a comparison of
European and Chinese internet regulation. In the course of two workshops in Beijing and
Munich in 2017, they worked on central topics of internet regulation in both legal systems.
* Christian Walter, Dr. iur., Faculty of Law, University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany; Professor in
Public International Law and Public Law, Representative for Academic Exchange, Faculty of Law, LMU
Munich, Munich 80539, Germany. Contact: cwalter@jura.uni-muenchen.de
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