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