Australian telecommunications providers are worried that the government’s plan to let global technology services like Microsoft’s Skype and Google’s Gmail services avoid its controversial data retention scheme would encourage customers to abandon their services.

The government is attempting to pass data retention laws that would force Australia’s telecommunications companies to store the metadata of all users for two years. Metadata is the information produced when people interact with technology and can include everything from the time and date of phone calls to the locations of people at any given time.