New license rules and recent price changes in Germany

According to DWD new license rules will be applied in Germany. They include a re-distribution fee and a special internet fee to provide VAS type A and B. The special pricing for these licenses would mean a multiplication of the price for many independent service providers. This is especially the case for small service providers who should pay 11% of their revenue. In this case the new regulations lead to costs of 20% to 30%. This would mean that some of the service providers have to stop their activities completely.

Additionally we consider services where just extractions of a complete SYNOP are shown (temperature and weather symbol for example), i.e. a VAS type C and not a type B service. It is impossible to generate a complete SYNOP report from some parameters presented in the newspaper or an internet site.

The internet license is also not applicable in practice. No portal site will make available their special page impressions as these are business secrets. The NMS's try to police the internet which is neither intended by the EU nor by the national governments, nor possible in practice.

ECOMET should therefore specify that the re-distribution licenses are not applicable unless the original data is transmitted as received from the NMS. Furthermore the internet license with 'pay per click' cannot be applied technically, nor does DWD as a competitor in the market place have the right to know how many clicks its competitors record. Finally the planned breach of the 11% rule should be blocked.

Dennis Schulze
22ndMay 2002