European Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton delivers a speech during a press conference on the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
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BARCELONA, Spain — A top European Union official insisted Monday that the talk around tech giants paying for his or her usage of telecom networks isn’t sparking a “battle” between Big Tech and telcos.
Telecom groups are pushing European regulators to implement a framework where the businesses that send traffic along their networks are charged a fee. They are saying this — generally known as “sender pays” — would help fund mammoth upgrades to their infrastructure.
Their logic is that certain platforms, like Amazon Prime and Netflix, chew through gargantuan amounts of information and may due to this fact foot a part of the bill for adding latest capability to deal with the increased strain.
Last week, the EU launched a consultation aimed toward boosting Europe’s telecoms infrastructure. In it, there was a questionnaire asking whether to ascertain a digital fund on the EU or national level, or require a direct contribution from web giants to the telco operators.
On the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, European Commissioner for the Internal Market Thierry Breton suggested that regulation within the EU was not fit for purpose and that it was time to reconsider how the present model works.
“We’re at first of a latest revolution. In the approaching years, the entire industry might want to undergo a radical shift and revisit its business models,” Breton said on stage at MWC.
“The consultation has been described by many because the battle over fair proportion between Big Telco and Big Tech. A binary alternative between those that provide networks today and people who feed them with the traffic.”
Nonetheless, he insisted that there isn’t necessarily a “battle over fair proportion between Big Telco and Big Tech.”
Ha said the bloc needed to “discover a financing model for the large investments needed” in the event of next-generation mobile networks and emerging technologies just like the metaverse — while also ensuring that net neutrality rules aren’t undermined.
It comes as telcos try to reinvent themselves as cloud-based businesses. On Monday, several firms, including Deutsche Telekom, Orange, and Telefonica announced latest application programming interfaces, or APIs, which might open up their networks to software developers.
There are also attempts to make peace between the 2 parties. Prior to Breton’s keynote, the bosses of Microsoft and Google’s cloud unit appeared virtually, talking up their commitments to the telecom industry.
The CEO of Orange, Christel Heydemann, pushed back on claims that requiring corporations to pay for network usage would amount to a web “tax.” She added that it was a “first step” toward addressing an “unbalanced situation.”
WATCH: European telcos want U.S. big tech to pay for the web — but tech giants are hitting back
