Big Tech vs. Big Telco: Top EU official says there’s no ‘battle’ over network funding

BARCELONA — A prime European Union official insisted Monday that the controversy round tech giants paying for his or her utilization of telecom networks shouldn’t be sparking a “battle” between Big Tech and telcos.

Telecom teams are pushing European regulators to implement a framework the place the businesses that ship site visitors alongside their networks are charged a price. They say this — often known as “sender pays” — would assist fund mammoth upgrades to their infrastructure.

Their logic is that sure platforms, like Amazon Prime and Netflix, chew via gargantuan quantities of knowledge and may due to this fact foot a part of the invoice for including new capability to deal with the elevated pressure.

Last week, the EU launched a session aimed toward boosting Europe’s telecoms infrastructure. In it, there was a questionnaire asking whether or not to ascertain a digital fund on the EU or nationwide degree, or require a direct contribution from web giants to the telco operators.

At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, European Commissioner for the Internal Market Thierry Breton recommended that regulation within the EU was not match for objective and that it was time to rethink how the present mannequin works.

“We are at the beginning of a new revolution. In the coming years, the whole industry will need to undergo a radical shift and revisit its business models,” Breton stated on stage at MWC.

“The consultation has been described by many as the battle over fair share between Big Telco and Big Tech. A binary choice between those who provide networks today and those who feed them with the traffic.”

However, he insisted that there’s not essentially a “battle over fair share between Big Telco and Big Tech.”

Ha stated the bloc wanted to “find a financing model for the huge investments needed” within the improvement of next-generation cell networks and rising applied sciences just like the metaverse — whereas additionally ensuring that internet neutrality guidelines aren’t undermined.

It comes as telcos try and reinvent themselves as cloud-based companies. On Monday, a number of corporations, together with Deutsche Telekom, Orange, and Telefonica introduced new software programming interfaces, or APIs, which might open up their networks to software program builders.

There are additionally makes an attempt to make peace between the 2 events. Prior to Breton’s keynote, the bosses of Microsoft and Google’s cloud unit appeared nearly, speaking up their commitments to the telecom trade.

The CEO of Orange, Christel Heydemann, pushed again on claims that requiring firms to pay for community utilization would quantity to an web “tax.” She added that it was a “first step” towards addressing an “unbalanced situation.”

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