from the hey-everybody,-I-have-a-stupid,-self-serving-idea! dept

Huge Telecom lobbyists have been working additional time in each the US and EU, making an attempt to get policymakers to pressure Huge Tech to pay them billions in extra subsidies for no coherent motive. We’ve famous for a number of years how the push is self-serving bullshit by anti-competitive telecom giants, but because of their lobbying affect, the trouble exhibits no signal of slowing down.

The push is at the moment hottest within the EU, the place the European Fee is taking public enter on their plan to pressure on-line platforms to pay for telecom giants’ broadband community upgrades and expansions.

Netflix has been understandably proof against the plan. Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters told EU leaders last week that the telecom business is successfully making an attempt to double dip:

Broadband clients, who drive this elevated utilization, already pay for the event of the community by their subscription charges. Requiring leisure firms—each streamers and broadcasters—to pay extra on prime would imply ISPs successfully charging twice for a similar infrastructure.”

The telecom business’s effort to tax “Huge Tech” at all times includes some variant of the declare that common tech companies are getting a “free ride” on the Web, so it’s “solely truthful” that they assist pay telecom giants for broadband growth. Regulators have discovered that’s simply not true, given tech firms and platforms routinely spend billions on their very own bandwidth and infrastructure, starting from content material supply networks and transit routes to undersea cables.

Organizations just like the EU’s BEREC have acknowledged as a lot in experiences, noting that imposing a further troll toll (usually known as “sender pays” by the telecoms) would possible trigger market hurt and drive up prices for customers. From a 2022 report:

“The ‘sending get together community pays’ (SPNP) mannequin would supply ISPs the flexibility to use the termination monopoly and it’s conceivable that such a big change could possibly be of great hurt to the Web ecosystem.”

However simply as within the U.S., politicians are so beholden to telecom giants (partly as a result of their “patriotic” help in home surveillance efforts) the trouble by no means appears to die. And typically even succeeds.

Telecoms in South Korea satisfied the federal government to implement this sort of mannequin and its been a sizzling mess, with Netflix even being sued by one ISP just because Squid Game was popular and resulted in bandwidth consumption spikes. However once more, all people on this chain, from Netflix to the broadband client, pays vital cash. No one will get a free experience. Telecom monopolization isn’t mild.

Telecom subsidy packages in each the U.S. and EU are in determined want of reform. The contribution base for packages just like the USF (into the U.S.) is shrinking, and telecoms have a really lengthy historical past of taking billions of {dollars} for telecom upgrades which might be then routinely only half-delivered. The broadband mapping information we use to dole out that cash can also be painfully inaccurate, making the abuse worse.

Any significant effort to repair this drawback ought to most likely first goal reform of the subsidies telecom giants already get. As an alternative, politically influential telecom firms have satisfied captured regulators within the EU (and U.S.) that taking billions in extra {dollars} and giving it to the telecoms (with out meaningfully reforming the underlying packages) is one of the best path ahead.

That’s to not say there can’t be a future the place tech giants assist contribute to broadband infrastructure, however this present push is nothing greater than a multi-billion greenback handout to predatory telecom giants which have labored tirelessly for many years to crush competitors and drive up charges. Rewarding them with billions of extra {dollars} makes no coherent sense, but right here we’re.

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Firms: netflix


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