Internet Users In Germany Protest High Phone Rates

November 2, 1998

Internet Users In Germany Protest High Phone Rates

By EDMUND L. ANDREWS

RANKFURT, Germany -- Joining a protest by Internet users that is gaining popularity in Europe, thousands of people and hundreds of World Wide Web site operators waged a one-day "boycott" Sunday over high telephone and Internet access charges against Germany's dominant telephone company.

B. Bostelmann/Argum
Thomas von Treichel, a 20-year-old college student, helped organize an Internet boycott of Deutsche Telekom. "A company cannot survive economically if it places itself against the customers," he said.

Though the protest posed no financial threat to the company, Deutsche Telekom, the protesters nevertheless generated a torrent of publicity that has generally put the company in an unpopular light.
In what might or might not have been a coincidence, Deutsche Telekom announced last week that it would soon introduce new price cuts for Internet users and ordinary phone service.
The protest could signal a new trend in Europe, where many telephone companies charge by the minute for both local telephone calls and Internet access. Online consumers in Spain staged a similar protest in September against Telefonica. Rather than ignore the complaints, the company opened talks with Internet user groups and agreed to cut several key rates. Swiss groups are trying to organize a protest as well.
In both Germany and Spain, boycott organizers urged Internet users to stay off line for one day. Companies and people that maintain sites on the Web have been urged to shut down their normal offerings and put up "strike" banners in their place.
At issue in Germany are the Deutsche Telekom fees for Internet access and for local calls to its access site. German customers pay $1.10 to $2.90 an hour for local telephone service on top of Internet access fees that run about $2 an hour.
Heavy Internet users can easily run up telephone bills exceeding $100 a month. By contrast, American customers usually pay a flat monthly rate of less than $25 for local phone calls and can obtain basic Internet access for about $20 a month.
It was not clear how many people had participated in the boycott Sunday, but support for the idea spread with astonishing speed after it was first proposed five weeks ago by Thomas von Treichel, a 20-year-old college student.
"A company cannot survive economically if it places itself against the customers," said von Treichel, who is studying computer systems and has been running his campaign from the basement of his parents' house in Karben, a suburb of Frankfurt.
Von Treichel heads up a small Internet club called Dark Breed. Sending out e-mail messages proposing the protest in late September, he quickly attracted support from thousands of people across Germany and from several companies. His most active supporter is Serico Internet Services, a Berlin company that provides Internet access and has complained that high telephone charges are keeping customers away.
By Friday, von Treichel and his colleagues said they had received 12,000 messages of support from individuals, and hundreds of organizations had pledged to shut down their home pages on Sunday.
One of the most active promoters has been a prominent German publisher of computer magazines, Heinz Heise GmbH.
Spiegel Online, the Internet site operated by the weekly news magazine Der Spiegel, is not participating in the strike but has publicly expressed its "sympathy" for it. German newspapers, television and radio shows also have reported heavily on the campaign.

Internet use is growing rapidly across Europe, but surveys indicate that that the growth in countries like Germany, with comparatively high telephone rates, is slower than the growth in the United States. About 9 percent of Germans use the Internet frequently, compared with 20 percent to 30 percent of Americans. In Finland, which has had local telephone competition for several years and local rates are lower, more than 30 percent of the population uses the Internet.
Hans Ehnert, a spokesman for Deutsche Telekom, said the company's prices were in line with those in many other countries and that they would continue to decline. But he acknowledged that local telephone prices were considerably higher than the flat rates available in the United States.

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	B. Bostelmann/Argum
	Thomas von Treichel, a 20-year-old college student, helped organize an Internet boycott of Deutsche Telekom. "A company cannot survive economically if it places itself against the customers," he said.