2023-08-13 03:15:26
19 years ago last Thursday, the first article appeared on netzpolitik.org at 1:12 p.m. “Software development threatened by patents” was the headline. As in many contributions from the first few years, it was about free software. netzpolitik.org started as a project by Markus Beckedahl, on some days he blogged ten link tips, event information and classifications on the site. But right from the start, other authors also helped design the content of the site. We reached out to them and asked for their stories from the early blogging days.
“We still did everything ourselves”
One of the people who took notes early on is Carsten Raddatz. From 2004 to 2008, he wrote nearly 300 posts for the site. In the beginning, Carsten was actually a webmaster, he says. He was responsible for the websites of newthinking, the free software press agency – and netzpolitik.org.
“Everyone was responsible for a little bit of everything,” he says of the times in Tucholskystrasse, when the history of netzpolitik.org began. Among other things, Carsten was responsible for updating the WordPress system, the code of which he now describes as cruel. He doesn’t really remember his first article, but in the months that followed he wrote a lot about the internet in China and Taiwan. And he helped organize events. “There were always Linux-related events in Berlin where interested people met.” Workshops, lectures and discussions also took place in Tucholskystrasse itself, where interested parties could exchange information about Linux distributions or Creative Commons licenses, for example .
“A lot of things were extremely casual, we still did everything ourselves,” says Carsten. And he remembers the times when he worked at the entrance to the first re:publica and in between rocked the pram with his children.
„Backpacking to World Politics“
Ralf Bendrath was there early on. Between 2005 and 2015 he regularly published articles on today’s site. But Ralf was already active at the predecessor of netzpolitik.org and had therefore known Markus for a long time. “The blog started out with the subtitle ‘Backpacking to World Politics’,” recalls the political scientist. “That was because we were involved with some activists and with the support of the Heinrich Böll Foundation in the preparatory process for the UN World Summit on the Information Society in 2003.” They went regularly to the preparatory conferences in Geneva.
“Back then, Markus was looking for a way to quickly publish reports from these conferences – and came across WordPress.” Ralf can’t remember whether it was called a “blog” back then. But after the summit, the story moved on, away from the UN focus towards a broader focus on internet policy. Ralf stayed with him until he started working for Jan Philipp Albrecht in the European Parliament. “I made it a rule not to write about things I’m working on in Parliament myself. Well, unfortunately there was hardly any scope left to follow other topics so intensively that it would have been enough for the already quite high standards at netzpolitik.org.”
Ralf still remembers one thing to this day: “I always like to think back to Jörg-Olaf Schäfers, who unfortunately passed away a few years ago.” Jörg-Olaf was a regular author of the blog until his death in 2011. “He didn’t like to travel around and was therefore never physically at a CCC congress or a freedom-instead-of-fear demonstration. But he was extremely appreciated in the whole net politics scene. I think he was the only author who got an account without Markus ever meeting him in person before.”
Markus met Jörg-Olaf once after he had published on the blog for a long time. But even if he died much too early, his numerous expert texts on internet blocking, youth media protection and his combative contributions to the debate on the first internet policy topics will always remain.
“The technological spearhead of reporting”
wetter has also been there for a long time, in long form wetterfrosch. His favorite memory: the penguin campaign from 2005 in the Berlin House of Representatives. “Microsoft offered food and drink and an information session about itself,” wetter wrote in an article. “We thought that lobbying could be a little more transparent: And we were there as embedded journalists.” Wetter was responsible for the photos and the stream via UMTS. Today he says with a laugh: “That was the technological spearhead of reporting.”
He recalls that the Microsoft spokesman approached him and criticized that they didn’t even have flyers with them to better convey their demands. But that was a precautionary measure, says wetter: “After a thorough study of the house rules, it was clear to us that you weren’t allowed to distribute flyers in the House of Representatives. We could have been kicked out immediately with that.”
The action did it bis ins Forbes Magazine, which called it the “final humiliation” for Microsoft. “Animals in the silly season always work,” says wetter. Incidentally, the campaign also had an indirect connection to climate change, he recalls. The penguin costumes in which the activists appeared were borrowed from the Green Youth. “They still had them because they had done a campaign beforehand to draw attention to the melting polar ice.”
Next year we will be 20 years old. We want and will celebrate this milestone birthday together with our companions and our readers. It doesn’t matter if you’ve been with us for more than a decade or just recently.
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