The Constitution, Law and Justice committee of the Knesset (the Israeli parliament) approved a reduction of the periodic fees imposed on owners of databases registered in Israel. The Israeli Protection of Privacy Law mandates the registration of databases in a registry maintained by the Israeli Registrar of Databases (the Israeli privacy regulator, nowadays a part of the Israeli Law, Information and Technology Authority - ILITA). The act of registration entails an application fee, and under certain conditions, the database owner must also pay an annually recurring fee.

Today, there are approximately 8,500 registered database owners, holding a total of about 20,000 databases. Around 70% of owners are corporations, 10% are non-profit organizations and the rest are individuals. About 6,700 database owners are required to pay the periodic fee and around 800 new applications to register databases are submitted to ILITA each year.

Thus far, the Protection of Privacy Regulations specified that the periodic fee be calculated as a function of several factors, such as the database owner's classification, the number of data subjects included in the database and the data's sensitivity. The number of databases that the owner maintained also played a factor. The newly approved regulations change the way in which the fee is calculated, establishing just one decisive factor in determining the fee: the database owner's classification (corporation, not-for-profit organization or individual). With regard to individuals, an additional factor will be taken into account, to distinguish individuals that use databases for business purposes from those that do not. The newly approved amendment will reduce the applicable periodic fee for most database owners. Source: Website of the Knesset (in Hebrew).

Law.co.il wonders whether we will live to see the day when Israelis are finally exempted from the obsolete duty to register a database - a duty whose repeal was recommended back in 2007. In 2012, the Israeli Ministry of Justice published a draft bill that sought to transform the registration requirement (in most cases) into a requirement to merely notify ILITA of the possession of a database (this requirement is also unnecessary, but we can live with it). Since then, the Ministry didn't even advance the draft to an official bill. Oh well, there's probably time. Even Rome wasn't built in a day (though when it fell it was destroyed very rapidly).