Can it be a router? – OLG Cologne on offer packages for internet tariffs

Background: Dispute over offer packages

The Federal Association of Consumer Centres recently sued Telekom Deutschland GmbH for injunctive relief on the grounds that the company had provided its customers with inadequate contract information. The company had also offered rental routers as part of the ordering process for Internet and fixed network tariffs. However, when accepting the overall offer, Telekom did not list the monthly rental prices for the router in the contract summary.

The Cologne Regional Court, which was the court of first instance, saw this as a violation of the market behaviour rule of Section 54 (3) sentence 1 TKG. This stipulates that consumers must be provided with a contract summary in accordance with a model stipulated by EU law before submitting a contract declaration. The court saw a direct spatial and temporal connection between the ordering of a tariff and a router, meaning that this provision also applied to the contractual conditions of the router rental.

Telekom countered this. Tariff and router are two separate products with equally different necessary actions in a joint ordering process. Both contracts could be concluded completely independently of each other. Consumers are used to entering into contracts with different sellers in one order process when placing collective orders, for example via Amazon.

Decision of the OLG Cologne

The Cologne Higher Regional Court nevertheless considers Telekom’s appeal to be unfounded and granted the consumer advice centre its injunctive relief. It follows from Section 66 (1) TKG that in the case of service and terminal equipment packages, such as the one in dispute, the duty to provide information applies to all elements of the package. Moreover, there is agreement in the literature that tariffs for Internet access in combination with rental contracts for routers could constitute such a package. The decisive factor for this is the simultaneous conclusion of both contracts and a close connection between them.

The difference between the two contracts is irrelevant, as Section 66 (1) TKG presupposes such a difference. The ordering of an Internet tariff originally covered by § 54 Para. 3 TKG “infects” the ordering of the other package components to a certain extent. The information obligations would then apply to the entire package.

The necessary close temporal and spatial connection results from the design of the ordering process. Already in the tariff order, a router credit is advertised in green lettering as a benefit of the Internet tariffs. In the course of the tariff order, this trend continues with the query “Which router would you like to book?”. Even if no router is selected there, the shopping basket line then shows a credit note for the router. Finally, a pop-up window appears when customers go through the ordering process without selecting a router, indicating that the consumer will receive a particularly favourable offer when bundling with a router.

The selection of the router thus fits seamlessly into the ordering process. The defendant had thereby itself placed the tariff and router in close connection with each other. It is also irrelevant whether the consumer is aware of contracting with several contractual partners due to his familiarisation with online trading. For the question of a close connection, it is not relevant how many contracts a consumer concludes at the same time, but whether there is a closer connection between them.

Conclusion

Sections 54 and 66 TKG stipulate minimum standards for transparency in the telecommunications industry, which consist of listing all individual price components of the interlinked contracts together in a clear contract summary. Comparable rules apply in other sectors, such as the travel industry. However, there is an additional and stricter obligation to indicate the total price.