Is your website up to date?

The Telemedia Act is passé; instead, the Digital Services Act has been in force for several months. Consequently, all operators have to adjust the impressum (similar to “printer's imprint” or “masthead”) and data protection declaration.

By Anne Kieserling

Is the Telemedia Act (TMG) still to be found on your website? Then you should change this quickly since it ceased to apply on 14 May 2024. It has been replaced by the Digital Services Act (DDG). The good news: nothing has changed in terms of content. The numbering of the paragraphs is unchanged too. Only a small effort is sufficient: in the impressum you only need to replace the old § 5 TMG with the new § 5 DDG – that's all!

There is also a need to act regarding the data protection declaration and cookie banner: whereas formerly reference was made to § 25 TTDSG, reference must now be made to § 25 of the new Telecommunications Digital Services Data Protection Act (TDDDG). Here too only the name of the law has changed. And the term "telemedia" should be replaced by "digital services".

Practical tip

You can simply leave out the statement of the relevant paragraphs! This is because there is no obligation to cite a law in the impressum. But all website operators should act since citing a law that is no longer valid could lead to warning letter under competition law.

Background: The purpose of the DDG is to implement Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 on a Single Market for Digital Services of the European Union in Germany. The regulation applies throughout Europe but there is another implementation in every country.

The author is a lawyer and specialist editor at Verlagsanstalt Handwerk.

More information: The international consulting firm Deloitte has compiled an overview of the regulations in many European countries. The PDF can be downloaded from their website.