Head of German CBI seeks more Digital Single Market

BDI (the German CBI) President Kempf to the EU digital summit: No more nations going their own way

- EU internal market instead of a regulatory patchwork

- Future federal government must promote network expansion

- Germany for Internet speed only at rank 15 of 31 nations

The Federal Association of German Industry (BDI) calls for the end of national all-embracing digitalization. "Legislative regulation can only take place at the entire European level," says BDI President Dieter Kempf on Thursday in Berlin, to the Digital Summit of the EU State, on the regulatory patchwork of the 28 EU Member States and government leaders in Estonia. EU law on data protection, for example, threatens to fragment through different implementations in the Member States.

"The rapid expansion of a Europe-wide high-performance digital infrastructure is one of the priorities of the EU Commission," said the BDI president. Industry 4.0, Smart Health or Smart Mobility rely on gigabit data rates, low delays and low network fluctuations.

"A new federal government must intensify the expansion of digital networks here," Kempf demanded. "It is a nonsense that Germany is for Internet speed in Europe at place 15 of 31 nations." As a leading industriall nation, Germany has an average connection speed of only about 15 megabits per second, the leaders like South Korea having about 26 megabits per second.

With a view to the coalition negotiations in Germany, the BDI advocates a coordinating body of the Federal Government for digitization policy in the Federal Chancellery. In addition to a pioneering role for public administration in e-government, the BDI also calls for the introduction of tax breaks for research, which is already common practice in 80 percent of the industrialized countries.

With more than 500 million inhabitants, the digital EU internal market is a larger market than the US market, with some 325 million people. The EU Commission estimates that a digital single market in the EU will increase gross domestic product per year by 415 billion euros, or three percent, and create hundreds of thousands of new jobs. According to a BDI study, Europe could achieve an increase of 1.25 trillion euros in industrial gdp by 2025. Prerequisite: Companies and government policy are driving the digital transformation of industry on the right path.

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