For the Internet expansion in the coming years, the German Bundestag wants to set essential cornerstones this Thursday. But not all parties are behind this plan.

The parliament should be in the morning in Vote in plenary on the Telecommunications Act, which, among other things, provides for the right to high-speed Internet everywhere in Germany. The black-red coalition wants to set a minimum level for downloading, uploading and latency – i.e. the response time – in motion, but this still has to be calculated. According to estimates, the minimum level is likely to be low; the lower limit for downloads would probably only be in the double-digit megabit-per-second range.

Already on Wednesday the economic committee of parliament had approved the amendment, as expected, the governing coalition of CDU / CSU and SPD prevailed with their specifications. That should also be the case in the plenary.

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The economic policy spokesman for the FDP parliamentary group, Reinhard Houben, sees the reform as ambivalent. It is good that a proposal by the Liberals on new rules for TV costs has been taken up, said the FDP politician. According to the project, said TV costs may no longer be billed via the ancillary costs from July 2024 – until then, the tenants still have to pay for the TV connection if the landlord wants, after that there is no longer such “apportionment” on the ancillary costs possible.

There is an exception to this: If the landlord has fiber optics laid in the building, tenants must pay a “provision fee “Pay for the infrastructure, up to a maximum of five euros per month. The FDP had campaigned strongly in the legislative process for this coupling of additional rental costs to fiber optic investments, and now the grand coalition is in favor of it.

The opposition FDP- The parliamentary group still wants to vote against the reform proposal because, from their point of view, the extensive legislative package does not set the right accents in other parts of the mammoth project. For example, Houben is critical of the planned “right to fast internet”. “This is an interference in the free market economy, which makes competition more difficult and therefore does not bring the citizens any significant advantage,” complained the liberal. Just because people in the countryside were entitled to something better on the Internet, that doesn’t mean it would come.

It would be better To give residents of small villages or farms vouchers that are funded by the state and that they can redeem at telecommunications providers, Houben said. “That would be an incentive system for the industry that works better than compulsion.” dpa

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