Supporters and opponents of the “fair share” telecommunications concept—i.e. forcing the likes of Netflix and Meta to pay telecommunications network operators for carrying their traffic—can agree on one thing: It’s dead in Europe, at least for now.
I wrote about the EU’s fair-share debate earlier this year, but here’s a quick recap. Extracting such fees from Big Tech is a long-standing dream of big telcos, but net neutrality—the principle that network operators must treat everyone’s traffic the same—kept it off the table for years. However, with anti–Big Tech protectionism being in vogue, and with telcos facing major network upgrade costs, and with EU digital chief Thierry Breton being a former telco CEO, the operators recently launched a big lobbying push to put “fair share” up for consideration again.
