The federal network agency claims that XMPP clients have to be registered according to a German law that says that one has to be registered with (but does not need permission from) the agency if providing public communication services commercially.
It's a rather slippery slope from XMPP towards software which uses any of the other networking protocols, even TCP/IP and Ethernet, since they could all be considered telecommunications.
Germany has always been a very procedure-oriented country. This instills a "conscientious thoroughness" in their psyche. Which mostly pays off (for them).
There are options :
- they got this wrong because they don't understand how the net works
It's a rather slippery slope from XMPP towards software which uses any of the other networking protocols, even TCP/IP and Ethernet, since they could all be considered telecommunications.