Well, we already know what this law looks like. It's just the DMCA, expanded to other types of content. This is bad, but it's not nearly the end-of-the-world that the hypocritical US-Americans on HN have been claiming it is.
The problem is that these things often aren't "obvious". For example, one offense that is listed in the law is §185 of the penal code, which criminalizes insults (I'm not kidding). Because making every insult a criminal offense would make real freedom of speech impossible in practice, actual application of that law is subject to various and sundry constraints as the result of case law of the Constitutional Court. As a result, it's actually virtually impossible to commit such an offense in the political arena (in practice, the law has therefore been reduced to an institutionalized form of contempt of cop for the most part, and occasionally sees use as a modern form of dueling for the few bored and rich enough to pursue a private lawsuit: lawyers at ten paces, so to speak). But to understand that, you do have to be sufficiently familiar with the case law.
That's not much of a problem when an actual prosecutor examines the facts: the case against Boehmermann, for example, was pretty quickly dismissed, because the prosecutor knew it was going nowhere fast. But now let's have Facebook's staff – most of them without legal training – examine the same facts and they may very well get it all wrong. Or, worse: decide to simply not bother with getting it right and just err on the side of caution. The law does not penalize inadvertent censorship, after all.
I worry that the chilling effect, and people self-silencing/self-limiting, are already happening to an extreme degree. One might even regard this law as an expression of that. So I worry that this law is fruit of what is happening, not the other way around. I wonder whether there isn't already too much self-censorship going on, especially with people who just have their own nuanced (harmless) ideas.
HackerNews to me sits is remarkably well inside the eye of numerous storms. Really happy about that.
Outside from here though people might just risk so much when all they want is to try and express those (apparently "arguably") harmless thoughts. The risk of falling pray to all kinds of social dangers can be very scary. Not worth it at all, in fact. So devolves the discourse which obviously gives rise to agression and spite as the most popular clothing of free speech.
To an extent we're doing this to ourselves more than the governments are to blame. I'm not arguing that this law is any kind of solution to our problems. Au contraire - what I'm just saying is that individuals in positions of authority get more than their fair share of spite and hate, so, this is what happens.
Yet however also, not long ago the public discourses that take place at present were unfathomable! The whole world being able to talk together on to such an immense scale via thing called the Internet - which, somewhat hilariously ironically, apparently should be called just internet without a 'the' and capital I from now on, per decree put forth by some editors.
But never mind that. Point is, when we do a thing like this (give ourselves 'an internet' -o, hey!), pain is just bound to start flowing and we should be careful with that. Our social evolution is what feels to be at stake here, with the way things are headed.
"Obvious" wasn’t the term I’ve chosen, but the term chosen in the definition of the law and the official commentary of the law.