A new net neutrality battle is shaping up in Europe. As I wrote in a piece we published on the weekend, Europe’s legacy telecommunications providers finally have an opening in their longstanding quest to charge Big Tech for sending its content over their networks.
Thanks to an incoming tide of protectionism, along with the fact that Europe has promised to offer gigabit connectivity to all citizens by 2030, the telcos have a golden opportunity to try forcing companies like Meta and Netflix to help pay for new infrastructure. It surely doesn’t hurt that the relevant chief at the European Commission, Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton, is himself a former telco CEO who has already declared that “it is necessary to reorganize the fair remuneration of the networks.” Now he’s launched a consultation on the idea.
It's worth pointing out that Europe’s telecoms regulators rejected a very similar telco proposal in 2012—and said just five months ago that nothing had happened since then to change their opinion. With European traffic volumes increasing at an even pace, they said there was no “adequate justification” for intervening in a market that’s working as intended.
Would charging content providers be a net neutrality violation, though? At its broadest level, the principle of net neutrality holds that all internet traffic should be treated equally, in which case, yes, targeting particular content providers may be a violation.
However, net neutrality is generally seen as regulating access rather than provision: It’s supposed to ensure that consumers can access one provider’s content the same as they can another’s. That’s certainly the framing of the EU’s net neutrality law, which is perhaps why the telcos think their proposals would be legal—they insist they wouldn’t block or throttle any company’s traffic if it refused to pay up. Of course, if European law demanded that fee, the big content providers would have to pay up or pull out.
Even if it does manage to avoid a clash with the EU’s net neutrality law, what’s being proposed would fundamentally change the commercial dynamics of the internet—and as those regulators have warned, nobody has explained why such a drastic shift is necessary.
Given how influential EU tech law is on the international stage, what happens next will have ripple effects—so if any companies or organizations want to give their thoughts on the matter, the consultation can be found here.
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David Meyer
Data Sheet’s daily news section was written and curated by Andrea Guzman.
