One important factor is that one of our biggest political parties (the CDU/CSU, the one Angela Merkel is in) is basically run by and for 60+ year old people who stopped caring about technology in their teens.

To them, the internet with its homepages and electronic mail is a very recent and poorly understood development that will surely require another few decades of observation before anyone will know whether it’s actually good for anything.

And that’s the party that ran Germany for almost two decades uninterrupted. They’re by far not the only reason but they’re a major one.

As a Japanese I can attest that at least one other country is stuck like that too, and likely many others

Because German culture despises progress.