8 ms·

Kohl did the same in Germany by pushing copper cables instead of fibre in the 1980s since the former minister for post and telecommunication, Schwarz-Schilling,

Kohl did the same in Germany by pushing copper cables instead of fibre in the 1980s since the former minister for post and telecommunication, Schwarz-Schilling, was the owner of a company manufacturing copper cable. Typical example for corrupt politicians of Kohl's CDU party. https://netzpolitik.org/2018/danke-helmut-kohl-kabelfernsehen-statt-glasfaserausbau/ https://netzpolitik.org/2018/danke-helmut-kohl-kabelfernsehe... (in German)

guerrilla 5y ago
It's funny how openly corrupt German political party leaders always turn out to be, yet we still don't consider it to be a corrupt country.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > we still don't consider it to be a corrupt country It’s by and large not, and to the degree it is, it’s open and not insidious. The kind of corruption that kills economies is the insidious type. (And the stealy variety.)
  - radicaldreamer 5y ago
    I disagree, VW/Mercedes emissions scandals and Wirecard (particularly the behavior of BaFin, which was defending wirecard and harassing journalists for years) point to entrenched corruption. Nobody in government or industry has really been prosecuted for either (some Wirecard folks are on the run).
- alex_young 5y ago
  That was 40 years ago. Do you think they are still as corrupt?
  - guerrilla 5y ago
    Did you miss the last 40 years? Where's Gerhard Schröder work now?
  - LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
    Ahem. Cum-Ex
  - johndoe0815 5y ago
    Yes - and Covid even accelerated this by enabling shady deals for the delivery of overpriced masks by CDU/CSU politicians. There's even a Wikipedia article about this: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maskenaffäre https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maskenaffäre
  - Matt3o12_ 5y ago
    Yea there are many examples of high level corruption in the german government (and most western governments actually, including the US). A recent example is the mask scandal with CDU/CSU (same party) https://www.dw.com/en/german-mask-scandal-unforgivable-violations-of-ethical-standards/a-56833018 https://www.dw.com/en/german-mask-scandal-unforgivable-viola... You will not find much local corruption though, which is what most people think of when they hear corrupt countries. Local corruption is paying of a cop, judge, that kind of stuff. I’m sure it also happens in Germany, but that is very very rare.
    - cmrdporcupine 5y ago
      My experience, having German family: Germans in general are very much about propriety and doing things correctly and are often very harsh if you step outside this line. So to be corrupt in Germany, and places like it, is to do the "corrupt" thing "correctly" -- e.g. in some structural fashion tied to political parties, long term associations, business connections, etc. that have the appearance of being practical, official, and "right." A friend of mine who came from Iran originally had a comment like this about western countries corruption vs "third world" or "second world" corruption: In Iran or etc. corruption is almost more democratic, because it means as a regular layperson you can bribe some local official to make something go your way. It's not just, it's not fair, it's ugly, but it's "accessible" if you have some spare cash. But in the west, corruption is for the super rich and the connected at a much higher level. e.g. you can't bribe a zoning official so you can build an addition or a shed, but if you're powerful enough you can control a political party and prevent it from investigating your company, have it enact some preferential laws, or stop it from some raising some tax.
      - guerrilla 5y ago
        Yeah, I tried to explain this to someone about Portugal too... they didn't get it. If the system is completely broken and going to kill you in a "non-corrupt" country, there's nothing you can do about it as someone who's not a megacapitalist.
  - ta123457864 5y ago
    Why do you expect that corruption decreases over time?
- johndoe0815 5y ago
  Maybe a first step to discourage this would be to restrict the time the chancellor or any minister can be in office to two election periods (like the US president). Sixteen years of Kohl and Merkel governments, respectively, paralyzed the country and hindered progress especially in the digital sector.
  - guerrilla 5y ago
    Or just ban public officials from holding stock and from taking on jobs at state clients...
    - hetspookjee 5y ago
      They'll find a way, of that you can be sure. I think restricting the term is the only way possible to limit corruption in that regard.
      - prirun 5y ago
        Lottery elections: put people in office like jury duty. You don't want to be President? Too bad! You're qualified, have a good background (whatever that is), people have vouched for your character, so ... you're it for 4 years! I'd trust my next door neighbor to be President more than someone who actually wants to be President.
        guerrilla 5y ago
        Liquid democracy. You can assign to your vote to anyone and reclaim it at any time for any reason. "Representatives" would just be people who a lot of people temporarily assigned their votes to. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy
        fmmlp 5y ago
        Yes, Borges style: don't allow anyone who wants to be president to be it.
        5y ago
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
  Wasn? Bananen Republik Deutschland!
- Barrin92 5y ago
  Because corruption as an issue is overrated or wrongly defined. South Korea and Japan are mentioned in the article as exemplary countries when it comes to internet speed and infrastructure but both have virtually no dividing line between private conglomerates (Chaebol and Keiretsu respectively) and public administration. The same is true in Germany, but with few exceptions that kind of intersection doesn't matter because governance is by and large effective, which beats clean. In fact this kind of conglomeration between the public and private sector is why they get things done, compared to the vetocratic nature of other countries.
  - RicoElectrico 5y ago
    German corruption indirectly affects the stability of the European Union, as they with France are de-facto most important players now. In the "new EU" countries, whatever Germany does wrong or hypocritical will surely be weaponized by euro-skeptics.
  - pyuser583 5y ago
    Both countries have reputations for terrible “big business style” corruption. And really good infrastructure.
  - JamisonM 5y ago
    If my recollections are accurate South Korea had a lot of fibre laid by power companies that turned out to be useful for internet precisely because it was a corruption situation where there was an infinite budget and no oversight and they ran optical lines for power meters for no good reason and it turned out to be a win in the end.
- foobarian 5y ago
  It's because they do even their corruption by the book, so it seems legit.
- cjbgkagh 5y ago
  Germans are really good at Public Relations (PR) but people don’t think they are, which helps them be good at PR.
  - lampenrad 5y ago
    That is not the case. Otherwise, with regards to the war in Ukraine, Germany wouldn’t get this singled out when it comes to criticism. In fact, one of the biggest domestic criticisms of the government right now is their terrible communication strategy. English is the lingua franca and as such Anglo media has an incredible amount of power in shaping opinions in the West. And frankly, the reporting, particularly from Anglo and Eastern European media, has had a heavy anti-German bias for weeks now. (Up from the usual moderate bias)
    - guerrilla 5y ago
      I don't think this contradicts their point... Others can be more powerful, but most of the time those more powerful aren't attacking them. The rest of the time Germany's PR is good and working...
    - cjbgkagh 5y ago
      I would measure the efficacy of PR as the difference between perception and reality. The amount people are disappointed by revelations demonstrates the extent of that difference. Germany has always been like this and the disappointments are recent. I would say that the Anglo-sphere has better PR, it is an essential part of maintaining an empire, but people tend to know that the Anglo-sphere is highly active in PR so it comes as less of a surprise.
- imtringued 5y ago
  It's a corrupt country but its economy is big enough that it can shoulder a parasite or a dozen. Developing countries and eastern Europe does not have this luxury.
  - guerrilla 5y ago
    Hmm, that's plausible. I'd still like to see someone try to measure that though. Interesting thought. I'm not sure Germany isn't experiencing negative effects from this though. Like the Gazprom thing, for example, this broadband thing, maybe even the nuclear thing?
  - lampenrad 5y ago
    If Germany is a "corrupt country", than what‘s the rest of Europe?: https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/koyyv5/european_public_sector_corruption_index/ https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/koyyv5/european_pub...
    - guerrilla 5y ago
      You're begging the question. My original point is that it's very surprising that Germany gets these ratings despite them being openly corrupt.
- jjtheblunt 5y ago
  maybe because they get exposed, then fail re-election
DoingIsLearning 5y ago
> Typical example for corrupt politicians of Kohl's CDU party. Schröder is SPD and he seems to be shoulders deep in Nord Stream controversy and Gazprom money. So it kind of looks like a German political class issue rather than a CDU issue.
- johndoe0815 5y ago
  CDU/CSU politicians are at least caught more often than SPD-related politicians. But Schröder and also Scholz certainly also have some skeletons in the closet (and don't get me started on the FDP or AfD...). There's another Wikipedia article listing known corruption affairs: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von_Korruptionsaffären_um_Politiker_in_der_Bundesrepublik_Deutschland https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von_Korruptionsaffären_u...
  - coob 5y ago
    Scholz has also consistently lied about not blocking getting heavy weapons to Ukraine.
riedel 5y ago
Actually the cited article rather explains that the move to copper was also heavily motivated to support cable television which allowed to stream more right leaning media to households. In the end it is mostly about power not necessarily corruption.
formerly_proven 5y ago
The problem with old fiber is that active networks are even more of a dead-end than copper. Active fiber networks leave you with whatever tech you buried and put up on every corner; upgrading is basically as expensive as laying new line. It seems to me like in the 80s and 90s active networks were favored (see e.g. OPAL) - which would be far more useless today than copper, as copper's capabilities expanded hugely over time as more sophisticated modulation techniques became possible.
- radicaldreamer 5y ago
  Copper is still trash though compared to passive fiber... and expensive to run. Loads of electricity and amps required to use it and a lot of fine tuning and interference management and maintenance. A ton of costly, endless work when you can bypass all of that by laying some passive fiber...
- quink 5y ago
  > upgrading is basically as expensive as laying new line That assertion is highly dependent on too many factors and even recent developments to be of much use. That general assertion needs to be backed up with everything around the soil type, the copper diameter, labour costs, protocols and type of fibre, etc., etc. And if you’re going down the route of having VDSL ISAMs in the field anyway then you’re certainly going to have the infrastructure there already anyway to support GPON over whatever fibre is in the ground anyway. And are you sure that by “copper’s capabilities” you’re not actually referring to progressively closer deployment of infrastructure to the customer to overcome copper’s limitations? Because the move from dial any number to the local exchange to a node (FTTN) to now the curb (FTTC) certainly seems to reflect that more adequately.
  - gopher_space 5y ago
    Are there more people available to work on one vs the other, or would you be trained to handle both?
- ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  Do you have any links to Korea or Japan hitting these insurmountable problems? Last I heard they had better internet than the UK fairly consistently for decades. Though, if they did hit a problem, just sensibly regulating shared national infrastructure of high industrial, cultural and economic importance seems like it would solve anything that came up better rather than shouting "free market" and "regulation bad" while you hand things over to American corporations in an act of brazen corruption.
fweimer 5y ago
There were some fairly large fiber rollouts in the late 80s/early 90s (OPAL, Optische Anschlußleitung). No copper meant it was impossible to deploy DSL, and available optical networking technology wasn't cost-effective during the first years of DSL rollout. Rumor has it that the old OPAL infrastructure can be used for GPON today, but that became available only much later. For many years, your best hope as an OPAL customer was that the incumbent eventually deployed copper. I'm not sure if OPAL deployment at a much larger scale would have created a sufficiently large market for optical networking equipment and bring down prices much earlier. Probably the number of impacted OPAL customers would simply have been larger. (The copper cable mentioned in the article is actually TV broadband cable, and that had much less coverage than the copper phone lines eventually repurposed for DSL.)
WalterBright 5y ago
All politicians are corrupt like that. Another reason why socialism is inefficient and uncompetitive.
throwmeariver1 5y ago
It was our luck google „Opalghetto“ and you know what the Telekom tried with fiber…
pankajdoharey 5y ago
Personal Profits and Kick Backs, isnt that the story everywhere? Democracies need to pass specific laws to curtail the powers of technically illiterate politicians when it comes to making decisions about technology. Perhaps there should be laws on how only Domain experts could make laws about certain field and the minimum requirement to become a politician should be that one needs to be a domain expert. And yes not a domain expert in Humanities, Social Sciences , Arts.

guerrilla 5y ago

It's funny how openly corrupt German political party leaders always turn out to be, yet we still don't consider it to be a corrupt country.

JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> we still don't consider it to be a corrupt country It’s by and large not, and to the degree it is, it’s open and not insidious. The kind of corruption that kills economies is the insidious type. (And the stealy variety.)
- radicaldreamer 5y ago
  I disagree, VW/Mercedes emissions scandals and Wirecard (particularly the behavior of BaFin, which was defending wirecard and harassing journalists for years) point to entrenched corruption. Nobody in government or industry has really been prosecuted for either (some Wirecard folks are on the run).
alex_young 5y ago
That was 40 years ago. Do you think they are still as corrupt?
- guerrilla 5y ago
  Did you miss the last 40 years? Where's Gerhard Schröder work now?
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
  Ahem. Cum-Ex
- johndoe0815 5y ago
  Yes - and Covid even accelerated this by enabling shady deals for the delivery of overpriced masks by CDU/CSU politicians. There's even a Wikipedia article about this: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maskenaffäre https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maskenaffäre
- Matt3o12_ 5y ago
  Yea there are many examples of high level corruption in the german government (and most western governments actually, including the US). A recent example is the mask scandal with CDU/CSU (same party) https://www.dw.com/en/german-mask-scandal-unforgivable-violations-of-ethical-standards/a-56833018 https://www.dw.com/en/german-mask-scandal-unforgivable-viola... You will not find much local corruption though, which is what most people think of when they hear corrupt countries. Local corruption is paying of a cop, judge, that kind of stuff. I’m sure it also happens in Germany, but that is very very rare.
  - cmrdporcupine 5y ago
    My experience, having German family: Germans in general are very much about propriety and doing things correctly and are often very harsh if you step outside this line. So to be corrupt in Germany, and places like it, is to do the "corrupt" thing "correctly" -- e.g. in some structural fashion tied to political parties, long term associations, business connections, etc. that have the appearance of being practical, official, and "right." A friend of mine who came from Iran originally had a comment like this about western countries corruption vs "third world" or "second world" corruption: In Iran or etc. corruption is almost more democratic, because it means as a regular layperson you can bribe some local official to make something go your way. It's not just, it's not fair, it's ugly, but it's "accessible" if you have some spare cash. But in the west, corruption is for the super rich and the connected at a much higher level. e.g. you can't bribe a zoning official so you can build an addition or a shed, but if you're powerful enough you can control a political party and prevent it from investigating your company, have it enact some preferential laws, or stop it from some raising some tax.
    - guerrilla 5y ago
      Yeah, I tried to explain this to someone about Portugal too... they didn't get it. If the system is completely broken and going to kill you in a "non-corrupt" country, there's nothing you can do about it as someone who's not a megacapitalist.
- ta123457864 5y ago
  Why do you expect that corruption decreases over time?
johndoe0815 5y ago
Maybe a first step to discourage this would be to restrict the time the chancellor or any minister can be in office to two election periods (like the US president). Sixteen years of Kohl and Merkel governments, respectively, paralyzed the country and hindered progress especially in the digital sector.
- guerrilla 5y ago
  Or just ban public officials from holding stock and from taking on jobs at state clients...
  - hetspookjee 5y ago
    They'll find a way, of that you can be sure. I think restricting the term is the only way possible to limit corruption in that regard.
    - prirun 5y ago
      Lottery elections: put people in office like jury duty. You don't want to be President? Too bad! You're qualified, have a good background (whatever that is), people have vouched for your character, so ... you're it for 4 years! I'd trust my next door neighbor to be President more than someone who actually wants to be President.
      - guerrilla 5y ago
        Liquid democracy. You can assign to your vote to anyone and reclaim it at any time for any reason. "Representatives" would just be people who a lot of people temporarily assigned their votes to. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy
      - fmmlp 5y ago
        Yes, Borges style: don't allow anyone who wants to be president to be it.
      - 5y ago
LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
Wasn? Bananen Republik Deutschland!
Barrin92 5y ago
Because corruption as an issue is overrated or wrongly defined. South Korea and Japan are mentioned in the article as exemplary countries when it comes to internet speed and infrastructure but both have virtually no dividing line between private conglomerates (Chaebol and Keiretsu respectively) and public administration. The same is true in Germany, but with few exceptions that kind of intersection doesn't matter because governance is by and large effective, which beats clean. In fact this kind of conglomeration between the public and private sector is why they get things done, compared to the vetocratic nature of other countries.
- RicoElectrico 5y ago
  German corruption indirectly affects the stability of the European Union, as they with France are de-facto most important players now. In the "new EU" countries, whatever Germany does wrong or hypocritical will surely be weaponized by euro-skeptics.
- pyuser583 5y ago
  Both countries have reputations for terrible “big business style” corruption. And really good infrastructure.
- JamisonM 5y ago
  If my recollections are accurate South Korea had a lot of fibre laid by power companies that turned out to be useful for internet precisely because it was a corruption situation where there was an infinite budget and no oversight and they ran optical lines for power meters for no good reason and it turned out to be a win in the end.
foobarian 5y ago
It's because they do even their corruption by the book, so it seems legit.
cjbgkagh 5y ago
Germans are really good at Public Relations (PR) but people don’t think they are, which helps them be good at PR.
- lampenrad 5y ago
  That is not the case. Otherwise, with regards to the war in Ukraine, Germany wouldn’t get this singled out when it comes to criticism. In fact, one of the biggest domestic criticisms of the government right now is their terrible communication strategy. English is the lingua franca and as such Anglo media has an incredible amount of power in shaping opinions in the West. And frankly, the reporting, particularly from Anglo and Eastern European media, has had a heavy anti-German bias for weeks now. (Up from the usual moderate bias)
  - guerrilla 5y ago
    I don't think this contradicts their point... Others can be more powerful, but most of the time those more powerful aren't attacking them. The rest of the time Germany's PR is good and working...
  - cjbgkagh 5y ago
    I would measure the efficacy of PR as the difference between perception and reality. The amount people are disappointed by revelations demonstrates the extent of that difference. Germany has always been like this and the disappointments are recent. I would say that the Anglo-sphere has better PR, it is an essential part of maintaining an empire, but people tend to know that the Anglo-sphere is highly active in PR so it comes as less of a surprise.
imtringued 5y ago
It's a corrupt country but its economy is big enough that it can shoulder a parasite or a dozen. Developing countries and eastern Europe does not have this luxury.
- guerrilla 5y ago
  Hmm, that's plausible. I'd still like to see someone try to measure that though. Interesting thought. I'm not sure Germany isn't experiencing negative effects from this though. Like the Gazprom thing, for example, this broadband thing, maybe even the nuclear thing?
- lampenrad 5y ago
  If Germany is a "corrupt country", than what‘s the rest of Europe?: https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/koyyv5/european_public_sector_corruption_index/ https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/koyyv5/european_pub...
  - guerrilla 5y ago
    You're begging the question. My original point is that it's very surprising that Germany gets these ratings despite them being openly corrupt.
jjtheblunt 5y ago
maybe because they get exposed, then fail re-election

DoingIsLearning 5y ago

> Typical example for corrupt politicians of Kohl's CDU party. Schröder is SPD and he seems to be shoulders deep in Nord Stream controversy and Gazprom money. So it kind of looks like a German political class issue rather than a CDU issue.

johndoe0815 5y ago
CDU/CSU politicians are at least caught more often than SPD-related politicians. But Schröder and also Scholz certainly also have some skeletons in the closet (and don't get me started on the FDP or AfD...). There's another Wikipedia article listing known corruption affairs: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von_Korruptionsaffären_um_Politiker_in_der_Bundesrepublik_Deutschland https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von_Korruptionsaffären_u...
- coob 5y ago
  Scholz has also consistently lied about not blocking getting heavy weapons to Ukraine.

riedel 5y ago

Actually the cited article rather explains that the move to copper was also heavily motivated to support cable television which allowed to stream more right leaning media to households. In the end it is mostly about power not necessarily corruption.

formerly_proven 5y ago

The problem with old fiber is that active networks are even more of a dead-end than copper. Active fiber networks leave you with whatever tech you buried and put up on every corner; upgrading is basically as expensive as laying new line. It seems to me like in the 80s and 90s active networks were favored (see e.g. OPAL) - which would be far more useless today than copper, as copper's capabilities expanded hugely over time as more sophisticated modulation techniques became possible.

radicaldreamer 5y ago
Copper is still trash though compared to passive fiber... and expensive to run. Loads of electricity and amps required to use it and a lot of fine tuning and interference management and maintenance. A ton of costly, endless work when you can bypass all of that by laying some passive fiber...
quink 5y ago
> upgrading is basically as expensive as laying new line That assertion is highly dependent on too many factors and even recent developments to be of much use. That general assertion needs to be backed up with everything around the soil type, the copper diameter, labour costs, protocols and type of fibre, etc., etc. And if you’re going down the route of having VDSL ISAMs in the field anyway then you’re certainly going to have the infrastructure there already anyway to support GPON over whatever fibre is in the ground anyway. And are you sure that by “copper’s capabilities” you’re not actually referring to progressively closer deployment of infrastructure to the customer to overcome copper’s limitations? Because the move from dial any number to the local exchange to a node (FTTN) to now the curb (FTTC) certainly seems to reflect that more adequately.
- gopher_space 5y ago
  Are there more people available to work on one vs the other, or would you be trained to handle both?
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
Do you have any links to Korea or Japan hitting these insurmountable problems? Last I heard they had better internet than the UK fairly consistently for decades. Though, if they did hit a problem, just sensibly regulating shared national infrastructure of high industrial, cultural and economic importance seems like it would solve anything that came up better rather than shouting "free market" and "regulation bad" while you hand things over to American corporations in an act of brazen corruption.

fweimer 5y ago

There were some fairly large fiber rollouts in the late 80s/early 90s (OPAL, Optische Anschlußleitung). No copper meant it was impossible to deploy DSL, and available optical networking technology wasn't cost-effective during the first years of DSL rollout. Rumor has it that the old OPAL infrastructure can be used for GPON today, but that became available only much later. For many years, your best hope as an OPAL customer was that the incumbent eventually deployed copper. I'm not sure if OPAL deployment at a much larger scale would have created a sufficiently large market for optical networking equipment and bring down prices much earlier. Probably the number of impacted OPAL customers would simply have been larger. (The copper cable mentioned in the article is actually TV broadband cable, and that had much less coverage than the copper phone lines eventually repurposed for DSL.)

WalterBright 5y ago

All politicians are corrupt like that. Another reason why socialism is inefficient and uncompetitive.

throwmeariver1 5y ago

It was our luck google „Opalghetto“ and you know what the Telekom tried with fiber…

pankajdoharey 5y ago

Personal Profits and Kick Backs, isnt that the story everywhere? Democracies need to pass specific laws to curtail the powers of technically illiterate politicians when it comes to making decisions about technology. Perhaps there should be laws on how only Domain experts could make laws about certain field and the minimum requirement to become a politician should be that one needs to be a domain expert. And yes not a domain expert in Humanities, Social Sciences , Arts.