Because they didn’t find it independent enough?
You, as a councilor, also have a say in its competencies and its scope?
Yeah, you get one at some point, right?
Is it good to have this divided? Would you not want to have…?
What is the role of your ministry in that problem, because you don’t have data protection as an area of competence, have you?
Yeah. People say that it’s the largest, by far.
[laughs]
When I’ve been asking people over the last months, what are the major digital issues in this country, one of the things they come up with is data protection and the big data breach you had last year.
I’m glad that I can interview you. My first introductory question was, what are your main achievements in this term, of the government? What’s the outcome that you are proud of?
What I’ve been doing now in my sabbatical is spend a month in Singapore and one here – here I do five weeks – to understand how they are related, digitalization and democracy. It is very interesting to see also the difference between the two countries.
Yeah. I did all these things, and over the last 10 years, I’ve done more research again. I’m interested in digitalization and democracy, that’s my field.
Then I did a long stint in ICANN. I was a candidate of the global elections in 2000. Then I did IGF, that’s where I met Kuo-Wei.
I’m political scientist. I’ve been doing Internet research in Germany since the early 1990s. I’ve done many different things. Standard development, my first project was on IPv6, I looked at what engineers argue about.
Shall I introduce myself, or shall I just start with my question?