What the "right of the strongest" means in the history of mankind is being shown to us again with the utmost cruelty in the Russian army's war of annihilation.

It is not a "right" but an exercise of power without moral limits.

On the other hand, in a democracy, the state relies on the strength of the law.

But this has to prove itself.

In the digital world, which has long (co-)determined the analogue world, we have waited a long time for the law to prevail.

It took legislative pressure for tech companies to start sticking to rules that have long since applied to everyone else.

The fact that there is a right to intellectual property, a copyright, first had to be taught to the corporations whose business is based on earning billions from the assets of others.

What happens if the rule of law does not take care of it, we can see in the example of ancillary copyright for the press.

It is agreed for the EU, but the American mega-corporations are not sticking to it, especially not in Germany.

Google and Microsoft give publishers a handful for their content, and Meta, the parent company of Facebook, gives nothing.

Clearly illegal

One could not see what the demand to pay a license fee for press content was based on.

They would be set by users or by the publishers themselves.

This is the stance faced by the collecting society Corint Media, which represents 260 publishers and media companies.

Although, as Corint Media is now pointing out, Meta is also particularly audacious: In France, people do pay - because of the high pressure from politics and the public, which does not exist in Germany.

The chairman of the French collecting society DVP and former deputy chairman of the legal committee in the European Parliament, Jean-Marie Cavada, also points to this contradiction: He is pleased that Facebook has started to remunerate press content.

And he doesn't understand why the group acts differently in Germany.

This is not only contradictory, but contradicts European copyright law.

Clearly illegal, say the managing directors of Corint Media, Markus Runde and Christoph Schwennicke.

That's the way it is.

And that is exactly what the Federal Cartel Office has to take care of.

This is about the “abusive exploitation of a dominant position”, which the authority can also deal with “proactively”.

That's what she should be doing in the case of Google, Microsoft and Meta, and not just applauding the EU's new digital legislation.

Otherwise only the "law of the strongest" applies - and thus none at all.