Tech companies will soon have to pay for future internet-related infrastructure. A long-standing reflection of the European Union to compensate for the traffic generated by the services of these companies.
Will Netflix, Amazon or even Apple soon have to pay so that everyone has 5G and fiber? In any case, this is what the European Union has been thinking about for several months. And according to Bloombergthe plan to charge in the future the companies whose services consume the most bandwidth would be well advanced.
The goal? That these companies contribute to the payment of the next infrastructures making it possible to obtain Internet but especially a 5G network and fiber throughout Europe.
Too much data usage
The European Union also wants the creation of a mandatory system of direct payment from companies to telecom operators. Orange or Vodafone could in particular be concerned.
The big tech companies, in particular streaming services, are indeed particularly bandwidth-consuming, so that they can watch videos in very good quality, for example. And the ever-increasing use of high-powered, high-quality technology services, such as with the metaverse or the cloud, may well reinforce the need for more infrastructure. According to ETNO, the association of European telecommunications networks, Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Netflix alone accounted for more than 55% of online traffic in 2021.
Reflection until 2025
An official proposal from the European Union is not on the agenda for the moment and should only arrive by 2025. The body must still position itself on the threshold of bandwidth used from which a company can be called a “great traffic generator”.
“We see that some players generate a lot of traffic allowing their business to exist, but do not actually contribute to making this traffic work. The question of a fair contribution to the networks must be considered with great care. “, said the vice-president of the European Commission, Margrethe Vestager, during a press conference in May 2022 with Thierry Breton.
The project is therefore not new. For several months now, the EU has been trying to convince tech players to invest but also the various regulators and associations for the defense of freedoms on the Internet that this development is necessary. During the evocation of the project, the latter had expressed their fears about an endangerment of the neutrality of the web, where the big rich players could be favored to the detriment of the smaller sites.
