eco - Association of the German Internet Industry

eco, the Association of the Internet Industry, was founded in 1995 and is the largest internet industry association in Europe today. We believe in constantly shaping the Internet to make it a safer, more useful and open tool for us all in our everyday lives.

How We Do This

We do this by creating innovative solutions to better develop markets and their environments, promote technologies, facilitate communication between enterprises in the industry, and by lobbying at political platforms worldwide.

What We Do

We help to create transparency for users looking to employ services in the industry, through a number of quality audits and certifications: the Datacenter Star Audit (http://www.dcaudit.de/) and several Cloud-Computing certifications under our EuroCloud brand: SaaS, PaaS, IaaS as well as a SaaS Ready Audit for Datacenters (http://www.saas-audit.de/).

We continue to operate initiatives for a better Internet: The Anti-Botnet Advisory Center, the Certified Senders Alliance - providing mass-mail whitelisting for ISPs and recipients, the Internet Complaints Hotline - enabling users to report harmful content online, eco Internet law and regulations consultancy, as well as the Internet Governance Forum. We also hold a seat at all ICANN sessions.

We currently provide services for about 600 member organisations from around the globe, including some from the Global Fortune 500 list, such as: Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Verizon and AT&T. Our members are ISPs, cloud-service providers, hardware and software developers, telecommunication carriers, a great number of data centres, as well as start-ups and freelancers: everybody who lives and breathes the Internet is right at home at eco.

Our members meet at more than 80 eco events yearly: technical events on IT-Security, VoIP, Peering, Cloud-Computing, TLDs and ICANN, as well as political activities in Berlin and Brussels such as successfully lobbying for net-neutrality, freedom of information or against data retention. Our largest events are the eco Congress, eco Gala, the German Anti-Spam Summit (now re-named Internet Security Days) and the Web Content Forum, combined accommodating more than 2,000 participants annually.

We are a founding member of the world's largest ISP association, EuroISPA (http://www.euroispa.org/) as well as a founding member and host organisation for the Pan-European Cloud-Computing initiative, EuroCloud (http://www.eurocloud.de/). We also run the world's largest Internet Exchange under the DE-CIX brand, providing direct and settlement-free carrier neutral IP interconnection infrastructure to over 450 major Internet Providers from 50 countries.