Making the web giants pay for telecommunications? The battle will be long
As operators fight for Google and Netflix to finance their infrastructure, European Commissioner Thierry Breton announced a broad consultation on "network regulation". The Le Monde article
Should digital giants be forced to pay for the use of telecommunications networks? The controversial issue, writes Le Monde , has been brought to the fore in recent months, particularly after the statements by Thierry Breton who, in May, on Les Echos , considered this "principle as a fact". Asked on Friday 9 September, the European Commissioner for the Internal Market and Digital Affairs qualified his remarks: "we must not limit" this topic to the sole debate on the taxation of GAFANs (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Netflix) for the benefit of telecommunications.
“We have to ask ourselves whether our network regulation, conceived at the time of opening up copper networks to competitors, is still adequate at a time when the metaverse and its enormous data flows are looming,” explained Breton. He plans to launch a "broad consultation" in the first half of 2023. A legislative process lasting one or two years will follow, as for the two previous main texts governing GAFAN: the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act (DMA and DSA).
Is the Commissioner therefore backtracking on the idea of making the web giants pay for the networks? “It is the beginning of a broader reflection”, says Breton, maintaining the idea that “all users of the network will be called to contribute”.
If the Commissioner is cautious, it is because this subject is particularly sensitive. Telecom operators have been pushing for this measure for years and have doubled their pressure in recent months, hoping to get a sympathetic attitude from Breton, former CEO of France Telecom, and his colleagues in Brussels, who take a line. tough against the US GAFA.
"A balanced distribution of these costs is justified"
“We do not dispute the fact that we benefit from the contents of the platforms to sell our subscriptions. But a large part of our investments are directly linked to the content, especially videos, of these service providers. A balanced sharing of these costs is justified ”, summarizes a member of the ETNO (European Telecommunications Network Operators), which is leading the battle. In the EU, according to a report commissioned by Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefonica and Vodafone, the overinvestment linked to the increase in traffic would reach 15-28 billion euros per year.
At the diplomatic level, operators avoid talking about a "tax". Their idea is to impose a negotiation between operators and content providers. A system similar to that created by Brussels for the media with the proximity right of the copyright directive. In case of disagreement, an authority would decide on a “fair and proportionate contribution”, the operators propose. Only the largest suppliers would be interested.
And operators would be willing to work hard to show that the sums raised benefit the improvement of their networks, says the manager of a European operator. A report commissioned by ETNO suggests a total annual contribution of 20 billion euros at European level, compared to the 60 billion euros invested by operators. "A smart charging mechanism would encourage content providers to moderate their traffic," adds Liza Bellulo, president of the French Telecommunications Federation (FFT).
No political consensus
From a political point of view, there is no consensus on the operators' request. In a joint letter in early August, France, Spain and Italy came out in favor of a "legislative proposal that allows all market players to contribute", specifying that this should finance "the costs of digital infrastructure". Germany and six other European countries, including the Netherlands and Ireland, which are home to the European headquarters of many US technology groups, are more cautious and want an “open and transparent debate” during the analysis and public consultation.
The digital giants have begun to oppose. For Netflix France, it is wrong to say that content providers do not contribute to the infrastructure: to prevent content from traveling from servers in the United States, the world leader in video-on-demand has created 700 cache servers (CDN) – of which 40 in France – where its 6,000 films and series have been copied, since 2011, in all major operators. The series or film seen is therefore from a nearby city and does not saturate long-distance networks, the company concludes. Netflix also ensures that it constantly adjusts the quality of its videos, which therefore rarely interrupt, even in the event of a bad connection. According to the company, the financing of the networks is mainly linked to national policies and the number of competing operators: Spain, France and Sweden have fiber optic coverage of over 70%, compared to only 20% in Germany and Austria.
Likewise, Google claims it is "already a major contributor to infrastructure" and has invested $ 30 billion in 2021. Over the past two decades, the parent company of the YouTube video platform has created regional data centers, funded submarine cables for its intercontinental traffic and installed 8,000 CDN servers, of which 100 in France. In addition to adjusting the quality of its videos, the American company is making economic counter-arguments. Google underlines that telecommunications pay TF1 or M6 to broadcast their channels and their replay service: asking Youtube or Netflix to pay would be discriminatory … More generally, charging the major operators could, according to Google, question the " net neutrality ”, according to which the contents receive the same treatment.
On this issue, the NGOs that defend freedoms have begun to mobilize. "Resurrecting the business model of the telephony era would be a huge mistake," tweeted one of them – Edri – in May. "European net neutrality allows internet users to use their operator's bandwidth as they wish: for Netflix, YouTube, Facebook or a small local site," 34 EU associations to the Commission recalled in June in a letter . The risk would be to see operators – despite promises to guarantee neutrality – favoring the contents of suppliers who would pay, fear the NGOs, for which telecommunications "above all want to be paid twice", by the subscriber and distributor of contents.
(Extract from the foreign press review by eprcomunicazione )
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/economia/far-pagare-le-telecomunicazioni-ai-giganti-del-web-la-battaglia-sara-lunga/ on Sat, 17 Sep 2022 05:14:52 +0000.