eco International
In 2025, eco International further strengthened its role as a global advocate for the Internet industry, expanding its reach and influence worldwide. Through a strategic focus on virtual collaboration, policy development and international partnerships, the division actively engaged with members and stakeholders from over 60 countries. Its work combined international representation, policy leadership and targeted communication services for English-speaking members.
Global Initiatives and Partnerships
Throughout 2025, Lars Steffen, Head of International, Digital Infrastructures & Resilience, continued to serve as Vice-President of the EuroISPA Board. He succeeds eco Board Member Oliver Süme and eco Honorary President Michael Rotert, both of whom have served on the EuroISPA Board for many years. Michael Rotert remains as Honorary Speaker, while Oliver Süme continues as Chair of the EuroISPA Data Economy Committee.
eco also contributed to EuroISPA’s policy discussions through leadership in its annual reports. Based on EuroISPA’s 2024 Annual Report, Lars Steffen highlighted the role of digital infrastructure in supporting sustainability and decarbonisation across Europe, while Philipp Ehmann (Lead Berlin Office and Team Politics, Law and Regulation at eco) examined the interplay between artificial intelligence and data protection and the need to preserve room for innovation within the GDPR framework. In the 2025 Annual Report, Lars Steffen outlined a joint vision of eco and EuroISPA for Europe’s future connectivity infrastructure – from fibre networks and satellite connectivity to quantum networking and secure encryption – while Philipp Ehmann addressed ongoing debates on data protection reform and data retention in the EU.
During the year, Vivien Witt, Adviser International Stakeholder Management and Strategic Partnerships, also played a key role in advancing eco’s international policy work, including leading engagement with European institutions and partners. She represents eco on the Board of the European Internet Forum (EIF), where eco continued to contribute to board and steering committee meetings throughout the year. In this context, eco also began planning an EIF Tech Masterclass on filtering and blocking, aimed at informing the teams of Members of the European Parliament about the different technical approaches used for filtering and blocking and their respective advantages and limitations.
eco further strengthened its Brussels-based outreach with the eco BXLtalk 2025: “AI vs. GDPR: How to ensure a future-proof GDPR enabling AI in the EU?”, co-hosted with SAP, bringing together industry, data protection authorities and policymakers to explore regulatory and innovation challenges.
Throughout the year, eco remained highly active in international Internet governance, participating in ICANN meetings and related events. Representatives attended ICANN82 in Seattle, ICANN83 in Prague, and ICANN84 in Dublin. At these meetings, eco represented its members within the ISPCP and on the GNSO Council. Beyond attending these key meetings, eco organised three global follow-up online readouts (ICANN82 readout, ICANN83 readout, ICANN84 readout) to share insights with the broader community.
eco also advocated for greater inclusivity within ICANN’s new gTLD program, welcoming the extension of the Applicant Support Program deadline, enabling organisations from emerging markets to participate in the new gTLD application round launching in April 2026. At ICANN84 in Dublin, eco representatives further engaged with industry leaders on the importance of reliable data and strategic partnerships in preparing for this next phase of domain industry expansion.
In 2025, the topDNS Initiative – launched in 2021 by the Names & Numbers Forum Competence Group – continued to make significant strides in combating DNS abuse. In close cooperation with the Anti-Abuse and Security Competence Groups and partners such as the NetBeacon Institute and the Internet & Jurisdiction Policy Network, the initiative gained additional supporters and advisory group members.
This momentum also laid the groundwork for the formal establishment of the Internet Infrastructure Forum (IIF), co-initiated by eco and its topDNS initiative. The IIF was officially founded at its inaugural meeting in Amsterdam in February 2025. New advisory group members joining the topDNS Initiative included FIRST.org and Dutch Cloud Community, while 2025 supporters included Cloudflare, Public Interest Registry, Verisign, IQ Global, Realtime Register, Team Internet, SWITCH and nic.at.
In May 2025, the topDNS Initiative and iQGlobal also hosted a DNS Abuse Workshop at Nordic Domain Days in Stockholm, as highlighted by Thomas Rickert. Additionally, in November 2025, ICANN released a new Step-by-Step Guide: Submitting DNS Abuse Complaints, designed to help Internet users, security professionals, and stakeholders better understand when and how to report DNS Abuse to ICANN Contractual Compliance.
Beyond global Internet governance, the Alliance for the Strengthening of Digital Infrastructures in Germany continued its engagement in European sustainability initiatives. In 2025, the Alliance contributed to key milestones of the “Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact”, including the publication of Minimum Performance Standards and the transition towards EU-mandated reporting. This approach allows the Pact to provide expert guidance and data-driven insights, supporting sustainable innovation in the data centre sector.
eco also participated in major European research and innovation initiatives. FAME brought together leading experts in data management, data technologies, the data economy and digital finance to develop a trustworthy, energy-efficient and secure federated data marketplace for Embedded Finance (EmFi). Furthermore, launched in late 2022 and concluded in August 2025, TANGO (Digital Technologies ActiNg as Gatekeepers to information flOws) united 36 partners across 14 countries to engineer a platform that supports secure, interoperable and sustainable data exchange across sectors and borders.
Policy & Law
In 2025, eco’s Policy & Law division shared information on current regulatory topics from the European Union and Germany. These international insights were regularly shared via multiple channels, including Policy Alert, Policy Digest, the weekly View from Brussels, the eco European newsletter, as well as the EuroISPA Monthly Report. These are central pillars of the English-language service offer for international eco members.
In 2025, eco’s Policy & Law division published an extensive range of position papers, legal analyses and consultation responses, addressing key European and national digital policy initiatives. These included AI regulation, cybersecurity reform, data governance, internal security strategy, digital fairness and cloud policy. eco also contributed to discussions on combating online piracy, protecting minors under the Digital Services Act (DSA), and the legal framework for access blocking.
These included contributions to the Internet Policy Agenda 2025–2029 (including an assessment of the parties’ election programmes for the 2025 Federal Election), the European Internal Security Strategy, the Digital Omnibus, the Digital Fairness Act, the Data Union Strategy, and the EU Civil Society Strategy. eco also issued position papers on the General-Purpose AI Code of Practice, an Apply AI Strategy, and a proposed Cloud and AI Development Act, alongside input on the revision of the Cyber Security Act (CSA) and the retention of data by service providers for criminal proceedings.
Further contributions addressed the combating of online piracy of sports and other live events, the protection of minors under the Digital Services Act (DSA), and legal regulations on access blocking. Together, these publications underline eco’s role as a trusted policy voice, shaping balanced, innovation-friendly and practical regulatory frameworks for the digital economy.
Through these activities, eco reinforced its role as a trusted policy voice advocating balanced, innovation-friendly and practical regulatory frameworks for the digital economy.
International Members
In 2025, eco had 343 member companies from over 60 countries based outside of Germany. These companies made up 36 per cent of eco Association’s total 959 members. The majority are based in the European Union and North America. The continued expansion of English-language services in recent years has enabled more members to actively engage in the association’s work.
Collaboration
In addition, eco pursued its existing collaboration with a variety of European partner associations. The close exchange of views on positions and current topics with CISPE, the Dutch Cloud Community and the Danish Cloud Community, the Dutch Data Center Association and European Data Centre Association and other European industry associations was also maintained.
The collaboration between eco and the Internet Society in 2025 was primarily characterised by the joint activities of the Global Encryption Coalition. eco’s prior CEO Harald A. Summa remains to serve as a member and a Co-Chair of the Internet Society’s Organization Member Advisory Council (OMAC), which advises the Internet Society’s leadership on strategic and policy matters affecting the global Internet. Summa also joined the RIPE NCC Executive Board.
In addition, Lars Steffen is a Vice Chair in the leadership of the ISPCP at ICANN to promote networking among ISPs on topics such as domains and DNS.
International Communication
The English-language magazine for members, entitled dotmagazine, continued to attract great interest from readers and authors within the eco member community in 2025. Throughout the year, dotmagazine published 82 articles, covering a wide range of topics across the entire Internet industry’s value chain. Nearly 80,000 visitors from all over the world accessed dotmagazines’ articles and interviews.
The regularly changing topics cover all relevant areas of the Internet industry’s value chain. Interested members are cordially invited to contact dotmagazine@eco.de.
Newsletter, Social Media & Websites
dotmagazine newsletter provides monthly information about the association’s activities and regularly presents the latest articles. The number of subscribers once again reached over 1,400 in 2025. What’s more, the English-language LinkedIn account gained 260 additional members and now has more than 2,860 followers.
The eco International team also successfully continued its translation and support work for all fields of the association – which also included DE-CIX, CSA, eco Complaints Office, Alliance for the Strengthening of Digital Infrastructures, AI IN PRACTICE, the Datacenter Expert Group, the range of eco Competence Groups and EuroCloud.
Over the course of the year, 229 news items and interviews, in addition to a wide range of additional annual reports, studies, positions and documents were translated and published on international.eco.de.
In the year under review, the 82 articles were created and published for dotmagazine in collaboration with members, partners and colleagues from the various sectors. Increasingly, follow-up reports from selected webinars are also being created and made available to members via members+. The supporters of the topDNS Initiative also published a print edition.
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