United Internet provides many people with access to a digitalized world. However, the demands customers place on its products and services change and develop all the time. Consequently, continuously upgrading its offering, and hence ensuring current and future customer satisfaction, is of central interest to United Internet. This can be seen from a range of different projects and actions.
In the Consumer Access Segment, construction of the first pan-European fully virtualized mobile network has been based on innovative Open RAN technology from the start. Service and product offerings are continuously upgraded, with customer interests being included in the process.
The Business Applications Segment is participating in a number of initiatives designed to promote Europe’s digital infrastructure. One of these is GAIA-X, a federated data infrastructures project that aims to increase data sovereignty and to give users more control over how their data is stored, processed, and exchanged within a secure, open framework. IPCEI-CIS is an initiative for developing cloud architectures to promote digitalization in Europe. It is accelerating the expansion of an energy-efficient, digital infrastructure, enabling more people to participate in the digital economy. In this context, United Internet offers both a way of designing one’s own internet presence but also the infrastructure needed to share one’s own content, opinions, products, and services. This promotes both Europe’s digital economy and diversity of opinion. Indecent, illegal, or immoral content is excluded through specific terms of use.
Company brands GMX and WEB.DE offer e-mail mailboxes with associated cloud storage. The freemail offerings do not cost users anything and hence allow socially disadvantaged groups to participate in digital daily life. Information channels such as the blogs on United Internet’s portals offer easily understandable tips about e-mail, the digital world, and security, teaching key skills needed to use these new media. Parents and legal guardians are made aware of issues relating to digital participation by children and young people, and of how to ensure a healthy relationship with digital media, in a blog and a quarterly newsletter, with topics including e.g., “cybersecurity for kids.” A variety of blog articles are used to address sociopolitical hazards in the digital environment resulting from hate speech, fake news, or fake images. In addition, critical internet trends such as sharenting or child influencers are discussed.
In the area of e-mails, protecting customer data has top priority. At United Internet, e-mails and data are processed in line with the European GDPR and are stored solely in Germany in line with German data protection requirements. The Company’s GMX and WEB.DE brands are working together with other companies in data security initiatives such as “E-Mail made in Germany” and “Cloud made in Germany” so as to actively help shape security standards for protecting sensitive data in the market environment. The e-mail portals work continuously to improve the recognition and filtering of spam – unsolicited or harmful messages – so that it does not reach users in the first place. Spam can be anything from dangerous or harmful e-mails aimed at distributing viruses or at phishing down to unsolicited mails such as frequent mass mailings used for advertising purposes.
E-mail providers deployed improved methods and data science in fiscal year 2024, and again succeeded in increasing the proportion of spam mails that were recognized and filtered out by continually enhancing their spam scanners. As a result, the proportion of incoming e-mails flagged by customers as spam declined by 11% year-over-year. This increased both the relevance of the e-mails received and the security with which they could be processed further.
Users have to register and enter a profile name and password for almost all internet offerings, including online shops, social media, and app stores. Trying to manage such a large number of IDs and passwords is a major challenge for customers. Single sign-on services offer a solution here, allowing users to register with a large number of online services using a combination of their e-mail address and password. In March 2018, United Internet, the RTL Deutschland media group, and ProSiebenSat.1 founded the European netID Foundation (EnID) in order to provide a European alternative to U.S. offerings in this area. This independent foundation developed the netID open standard – a central log-in that is “made in Europe” and with which customers can log in to more than 90 partner offerings at present. At present there are roughly 15 million active netID users outside United Internet’s network. United Internet’s e-mail platforms are among the netID account providers, allowing their users to register for participating partner offerings via netID using their existing accounts. In addition, netID stores user consents in a stable manner across different devices.
netID uses a stable identifier to recognize users instead of third-party cookies, which are increasingly being blocked. netID is governed by the European data protection requirements set out in the GDPR. The foundation reviews all standards, partners, and account providers that are members of the initiative, focusing in particular on transparency and users’ data sovereignty. For example, users can independently consent to the use of their data, or revoke such consent, at any time using a “privacy center.” This improves data control in the internet.
The Company’s brands offer users not only e-mail and cloud services but also unrestricted access to content from their own, independent editorial team. The editorial news offering is not limited to the German market, but is also to be found on the localized national portals in e.g., Austria and Switzerland. Users of other country portals in the U.S.A., the United Kingdom, France, and Spain are offered an automated news feed in the language of the country concerned. Strict rules apply to adverts in all cases in order to protect customers from misleading advertising or offerings from the tobacco industry, for example. A total of 9% of Internet users in Germany use GMX, and 12% use WEB.DE, as sources of news every week. What is more, 5% (GMX) and 7% (WEB.DE) of users access the two freemail portals to obtain information at least three times a week. These figures are documented in the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2024.
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