Federal government competes with Somedia with official gazette solution
Das Staatssekretariat für Wirtschaft bietet ein «Amtsblattportal» zum Selbstkostenpreis an – und konkurriert damit direkt das Medienhaus Somedia, welches mit einer selbstentwickelten Lösung bisher erfolgreich war.
More and more municipalities and cantons want to move away from printed official gazettes and offer them in digitalized form in the future. One of the pioneers of this development is the canton of Graubünden - since 2016, it has been offering its official notices via the Diam digital platform. This is a product of the Chur-based media company Somedia, which Diam has been developing in collaboration with the canton since 2014 and has subsequently been able to sell to other cantons. Somedia has closed a gap in the market with the official gazette solution. The then president of the publisher and Somedia publisher Hanspeter Lebrument praised the project as exemplary cooperation between public institutions and the private sector.
The fact that the media house is now being competed against not by the market economy, but by an official body, is causing a stir in Graubünden. CVP National Councilor Martin Candinas told Schweiz am Wochenende that he was annoyed by the federal government's behavior: "That can't be the job of a federal office like Seco," he said. All the more so, he says, because Seco stands up for competition, the market and price transparency. For Candinas it is clear: Seco is causing a market distortion because it offers its own platform at cost price - the federal office must not make a profit.
Candinas thinks that Seco is "torpedoing" the jobs of a media company in a peripheral region that needs to reorient itself - and wants to submit an interpellation next week. He is upset, for example, that Seco actively offered the platform to the cantonal state secretaries in 2017, although the legal framework is still unclear.
Seco does not see the case so narrowly. They have a legal mandate from the federal government and the cantons to publish official publications and are allowed to make this portal available to cantons and municipalities, says Markus Tanner, head of the publications department, to Schweiz am Wochenende. He said that the eSHAB-online portal, today's "official gazette portal," had already been made available to the canton of Zurich six years ago, and Somedia did not apply at that time. The product is shared with the cantons and it therefore becomes cheaper for all parties involved with each canton that joins in. "Compared to Somedia's product, the costs of our portal are therefore extremely much lower," says Tanner.
