Speeches Didn't Kill the Fax Machine. Filing Rules Did.

On 25 January 2023 the German Federal Court of Justice turned down a lawyer who had caught COVID on holiday in Austria and sent a brief to court by fax. The court did not say the fax was slow, insecure or old. It said that since 1 January 2022, under § 130d of the Code of Civil Procedure, a lawyer's filing has to arrive as an electronic document, and being ill is not a "technical" reason for an exception (IV ZB 7/22) [1]. Two weeks later, in VIII ZB 41/22, the court added that knowing this rule is basic professional knowledge [1]. For lawyers in German civil courts the fax ended on a date printed in a statute, not at the end of a decline curve.

My thesis is that the fax outlived its obituary because it fitted legal and administrative routines that email did not replace: a signature the recipient accepts, a transmission report that counts as a receipt, and an established channel to a public authority. The machine was never the point. So the fax leaves an office when the rule naming the channel changes, and speeches and technical obsolescence do little on their own. The evidence below supports half of this cleanly. It also shows a second decline that has nothing to do with rules, and I will separate the two.

The obituary that missed its date

The best known obituary came from Washington. On 6 August 2018, at the Office of the National Coordinator's interoperability forum, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Seema Verma, asked developers to "help us make every doctor's office in America a fax free zone by 2020!" [2]. That speech is a primary source with an author, a date and a deadline, which makes it testable.

The test is the American Hospital Association's IT survey as tabulated by ONC. Hospitals were asked how they send and receive summary-of-care records. These are the shares reporting "mail or fax" [3]:

Survey year	Send: often	Send: sometimes	Receive: often	Receive: sometimes
2018	40%	31%	47%	29%
2021	35%	34%	42%	35%
2023	30%	37%	35%	40%
2025	40%	34%	35%	46%

Adding the two columns of the ONC table [3], my own arithmetic done without the Lab, hospitals that sent by mail or fax at least sometimes were 71% in 2018 and 74% in 2025. Those that received that way were 76% and 81%. Five years after the fax-free deadline the figures had not fallen. The 2021 data brief splits out a separate category, "eFax using EHR", used by 67% of hospitals to send and 62% to receive [4], so the paper fax is partly being replaced by a fax sent from software, which is the same channel from a different box. One caveat: ONC combines mail and fax, so I cannot isolate the fax. That does not rescue the 2020 target, because the electronic substitute was meant to replace both.

What did Washington change in the law? The main federal rule since the speech, the CMS Interoperability and Prior Authorization final rule (CMS-0057-F), was released on 17 January 2024. It requires decisions within 72 hours for urgent requests and seven calendar days for standard ones, with most of those requirements from 2026, and it moved the deadline for its required APIs to 1 January 2027 [5]. The press release says nothing about fax [5]. On my reading, America has so far made a rule that adds an electronic channel for some payers and has not made one that removes the old channel for anyone. If the thesis holds, hospital fax use should stay roughly flat until a rule names a channel and sets a date. The 2018 to 2025 series is what that predicts.

Japan: a cabinet request, 400 objections

Japan is the country every fax obituary mentions, so it deserves dates rather than jokes. In June 2021 a cabinet body asked ministries and agencies in Kasumigaseki to stop routine use of fax. According to the Hokkaido Shimbun, as reported in July 2021 by a fax-software vendor's blog I read in place of the newspaper, the government received about 400 objections and dropped the plan [6]. The reasons given were not nostalgia. Fax was a backup channel for disaster response, and it carried confidential material, including civil court documents and police communications, that ministries did not trust to ordinary email [6]. Note who made those objections. They were not users who could not cope with a mouse. They were offices whose procedures assumed a channel with a known sender, a known receiving machine and a printed transmission report.

The method that did work in Japan was a legal one. In late 2022 the Digital Agency set out to revise about 10,000 provisions of law that required analogue procedures [7]. One group of them specified floppy disks and similar media for submissions. On 12 March 2024 Digital Minister Taro Kono reported that 969 of 1,024 such provisions had been changed to allow online submission, leaving 55 [7]. On 28 June 2024 he declared "We have won the war on floppy disks", with all 1,034 relevant rules scrapped except one on vehicle recycling [8]. (The count moved from 1,024 to 1,034 between March and July in the sources I read. I report both and cannot reconcile them.) The floppy disk did not vanish from Japanese administration because people stopped buying drives in about 2011. It vanished, on paper, on a date, one regulation at a time, and the press could count the regulations. That is the shape I am arguing for.

The pandemic gives a smaller example of the same shape. Before May 2020, notifications of designated infectious diseases went to public health centres on handwritten forms sent by fax. The health ministry launched an online system, HER-SYS, from 10 May 2020 and took it nationwide from 17 May [9]. I could not open the full Japan Times report, so I rely on its headline and search summary for those two dates, and I mark it accordingly. Fax notification did not end because doctors found email. It ended, for that one reporting duty, when the ministry built a channel and required it.

The decline that needs no rule

This is where the thesis has to give ground. Japanese households also own fewer fax machines each year, and nobody legislated that. The ministry of internal affairs' Communications Usage Trend Survey, summarised from its 2024 round (published 30 May 2025), put household fax ownership at 24.6%, against about 40% a decade earlier. Ownership was 0.9% in households headed by someone under 30 and 4.0% in their thirties [10]. I have read this through a secondary summary of the survey. I could not get a readable copy of the ministry's own PDF, so the figure of about 40% is the summary's rounding and not my reading of the table.

Here is a rough rate, computed by hand and reproducible from those two inputs. A fall from 40% to 24.6% over ten years is a ratio of 0.615. The average annual change is

$$\left(\frac{24.6}{40}\right)^{1/10} \approx e^{-0.0486} \approx 0.953,$$

so ownership has fallen by about 4.7% of itself per year. If that rate held, getting from 24.6% to 5% would take $\ln(24.6/5)/0.0486 \approx 33$ years, which means some time in the late 2050s. I am not forecasting that. A cohort effect does not decay at a constant rate, and the age gradient (0.9% under 30) says the curve will steepen as older households end. But it shows the domestic fax dying the way most household technologies die: slowly, by generations, with no date anyone could put in a statute.

So there are two curves. Household fax follows the age of its owners. Office fax follows the rules of the office's counterparties. The thesis is about the second curve only, and I should have scoped it that way from the start.

The strongest objection

The strongest case against me runs like this. Rules follow use; they do not lead it. Germany shows it. Bitkom's annual telephone survey of 604 firms with 20 or more employees, taken in the first six weeks of 2024, found that 95% of firms used fax in 2018 and 77% in 2024. The share faxing often or very often fell from 49% to 25% [11]. No law forced German businesses to stop sending each other faxes between 2018 and 2024. Email, PDF and portals did that work on their own. On this view § 130d is just the state tidying up after a transition that was already happening, and my "date in a statute" is a mopping-up operation that I have mistaken for a cause.

I accept part of this. The halving of frequent fax use among German firms in six years happened without any rule I can find, and it was faster than my thesis would have predicted. Where both sides of an exchange are private firms, a technical substitute can drain the channel without any legislation.

But look at what remains. Asked why they still fax, 56% of the firms that do said fax is "unavoidable in communication with authorities". Another 27% said they need delivery confirmation and 10% cited legal requirements [11]. Bitkom's own officer, Daniil Heinze, called the change "surprisingly slow" [11]. The fax that is left in German firms is mostly the part that faces the state. The state's acceptance of fax is itself a dated legal artefact. On 5 April 2000 the Joint Senate of the federal supreme courts ruled (GmS-OGB 1/98) that a computer fax with a scanned signature satisfies the written-form requirement for court filings, even where legal representation is mandatory [12]. For about twenty years that decision made fax the legally safe way to meet a deadline. Afterwards, for lawyers, a single sentence of § 130d took the safe channel away on 1 January 2022, and from then on a faxed brief was simply disregarded [13]. Nothing comparable had happened to American hospitals by 2025, and their figures did not move.

The crux, then, is whether the remaining fax in institutions would have drained away without the rule change. I cannot prove the counterfactual. I have no series of German lawyers' fax volumes before and after 2022; on that the archive is silent, or at least closed to me. What I can say is that in all three countries the last and stickiest fax traffic runs to or from a public body or a regulated counterparty, and the endings I can actually date (German civil filing, Japanese floppy-disk submissions, Japanese infection reporting) are dates on which a rule changed. Exhortation with a deadline, which the 2018 American speech was, produced no measurable change by its deadline.

What follows if I am right

If the thesis is right, journalists' obituaries for the fax are written from the wrong records. Sales of machines and household ownership measure the first curve, which is generational and slow. The fax that matters for courts, hospitals and ministries sits on the second curve, and that curve moves in steps on statutory dates. The way to forecast the end of the American hospital fax is to read the Federal Register for a rule that names a required channel, not to count fax machines or to listen to administrators.

It also gives me one checkable forecast on the household curve, which is the one I argued has no rule behind it. I put the probability at 0.8 that Japan's Communications Usage Trend Survey for survey year 2026, if published by 2027-08-31, reports national household fax ownership of 20.0% or more. Reasoning: 24.6% in 2024 and a decline of roughly one point a year in the recent rounds. If it is not published by that date, the forecast is void. A reading below 20% would tell me the generational curve is steepening faster than my rough constant rate allows. That matters, because steep falls are exactly what I tend to underweight.

What this period cannot tell us is whether the pattern carries over to whatever replaces the fax. The fax made a sound legal channel out of two features: a machine-generated transmission report and an image of a signature. Its successors in Germany and in American payer rules are electronic channels with their own certified receipts, so they may also stick in place for decades, held by the same procedures. I would change my mind about the whole thesis if the next AHA survey round showed hospital mail-or-fax sending falling well below 70% before any federal rule removes the channel. That would mean American hospitals can leave the fax without a rule forcing them, and it would mean I mistook a slow transition for a legal one.