According to German internet-industry association eco, the agreement reached yesterday in the Bundestag’s Legal Affairs Committee—almost nine months after an expert hearing—on legislation to compensate telecommunications companies for services provided during criminal investigations is more than unsatisfactory.
None of the experts’ recommendations were implemented, and the government’s draft was left unchanged. eco chairman Michael Rotert said: “We are very disappointed. In the middle of an emerging economic crisis, the internet industry is being burdened with €332 million in costs for purchasing surveillance technology to implement data retention—a purely state-purpose expense for which there will still be no compensation. This is despite the uncertainty over whether data retention will survive the numerous constitutional complaints.”
The legislation provides flat-rate compensation applying exclusively to official requests. eco criticizes this as inadequate: the proposed flat rates for law-enforcement requests do not cover companies’ actual staffing costs, while many companies must maintain expensive technology despite receiving very few requests or none at all.
“Around 80 percent of companies in the internet-access market are small or very small. In email provision, around two-thirds of services are offered by providers with up to 1,000 customers. These companies receive law-enforcement requests only very rarely or never and would therefore hardly benefit from the new compensation arrangements, even though they are especially dependent on them economically,” Rotert said. In the United Kingdom, the costs of data retention are reimbursed in full and only the largest providers are obliged to retain data.
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