The future of the bill to accelerate the expansion of telecommunications networks, which has been controversial for around a year and a half, is up in the air after the traffic lights went out. The initiative was actually supposed to be finalized in the Bundestag‘s leading digital committee on Wednesday. But the former coalition factions could not pull themselves together and no majority could be organized for it. Now they are passing the buck to each other.
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The digital politicians Maik Außendorf (Greens) and Johannes Schätzl (SPD) explained: “The traffic light coalition had intensively discussed this law, which is important for gigabit expansion, under the leadership of the FDP and came to a very good and forward-looking result. We wanted the parliamentary procedure conclude this week with the 2nd and 3rd reading in the Bundestag. Now the FDP is dropping its own legislative initiative.”
The FDP digital expert Maximilian Funke-Kaiser doesn’t want to put on the shoe. He was surprised by his colleagues’ statements because the committee had canceled the TK Network Expansion Acceleration Act (TK-Nabeg) “on the initiative of the red-green minority government,” he told heise online. “We Free Democrats were and are always ready for talks. The fact that the SPD and the Greens are now blaming the FDP only makes it clear once again that this is not the issue for them.” Apparently they were just looking for a scapegoat for their failures. The law could have been negotiated weeks ago, but was delayed by the red-green negotiators.
The telecommunications industry is under massive pressure
Frederic Ufer, managing director of the industry association VATM, recalled Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s (SPD) promise to bring key legislative proposals for Germany and the German economy through parliamentary deliberations this year. This must include the TK-Nabeg. In order to advance digitalization, parliamentarians should recognize “the overwhelming public interest in the telecommunications infrastructure in the fixed network and in mobile communications” and thus decide on the urgently needed reforms and acceleration impulses in the draft this year. The government actually only wants to give priority to closing dead spots, for example in nature reserves, but not to expanding fiber optics. The broadband association Breko also criticized this.
For SPD parliamentary group deputy Detlef Müller, the TK-Nabeg is on the list of priorities that the people’s representatives should work through before the new elections on February 23rd. The law is “absolutely necessary” in order to “promote faster and de-bureaucratize” gigabit expansion in Germany. He emphasized: “There are no social democratic cell phone masts or fiber optic cables, we all need a comprehensive digital infrastructure.” Therefore, “we should talk constructively across parties about the implementation of this important project.”
(olb)
