European Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton delivers a speech throughout a press convention on the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
Josep Lago | Afp | Getty Images
BARCELONA — A high European Union official insisted Monday that the controversy round tech giants paying for his or her utilization of telecom networks isn’t 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 called “sender pays” — would assist fund mammoth upgrades to their infrastructure.
Their logic is that sure platforms, like Amazon Prime and Netflix, chew by means of gargantuan quantities of knowledge and will subsequently foot a part of the invoice for including new capability to deal with the elevated pressure.
Last week, the EU launched a session geared 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 prompt that regulation within the EU was no longer match for function 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 growth of next-generation cellular networks and rising applied sciences just like the metaverse — whereas additionally ensuring that web neutrality guidelines aren’t undermined.
It comes as telcos try to 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 business.
The CEO of Orange, Christel Heydemann, pushed again on claims that requiring corporations to pay for network utilization would quantity to an web “tax.” She added that it was a “first step” towards addressing an “unbalanced situation.”
WATCH: European telcos need U.S. massive tech to pay for the web — however tech giants are hitting again
