Archive notice: This article was originally published on March 12, 2008. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
This is long overdue. “Whoever orders pays! This simple principle must apply not only on constitutional grounds, but is also the decisive lever for cost-efficient action by the public sector. Nevertheless, for years the costs of criminal prosecution, an inherently state responsibility, have been shifted onto companies to a steadily increasing extent,” says Oliver Süme, eco Board Member for Law and Regulation.
“With the introduction of data retention, this burden is now taking on a new dimension that threatens medium-sized businesses and the competitiveness of the industry in Germany. Internet industry companies are being forced to purchase technology worth 332 million euros that they must maintain solely for the state.”
The coalition parliamentary groups have submitted a draft flat-rate compensation scheme that applies exclusively to requests from the authorities. eco criticises it as inadequate: the proposed flat rates for requests from law enforcement agencies do not cover the actual costs, nor does the scheme take account of the problem that many companies must maintain expensive technology even though they receive very few requests or none at all.
“In the Internet access sector, around 80 per cent of the companies operating in the market are small or very small. In email provision, around two-thirds of email services are offered by providers with up to 1,000 customers. These companies receive requests from law enforcement agencies extremely rarely or never and would therefore hardly benefit from the new compensation scheme, even though they are particularly dependent on it economically,” says Oliver Süme.
Given the scale of the costs of conventional telecommunications surveillance and data retention, eco is calling for compensation for the purchase and operating costs of surveillance technology as well as the administrative effort of processing requests. A hardship provision should also relieve small and medium-sized companies that receive hardly any requests from the authorities. The compensation rates for processing these requests must also be raised to cover the staff costs actually incurred.
