Tech giants reminiscent of Google, Meta and Netflix might need to bear a number of the price of Europe’s telecoms community, Europe’s digital chief Margrethe Vestager mentioned on Monday, following EU telecoms operators’ complaints.
“I think there is an issue that we need to consider with a lot of focus, and that is the issue of fair contribution to telecommunication networks,” Vestager advised a information convention.
“Because we see that there are players who generate a lot of traffic that then enables their business but who have not been contributing actually to enable that traffic. They have not been contributing to enabling the investments in the rollout of connectivity,” she mentioned.
“And we are in the process of getting a thorough understanding of how could that be enabled,” Vestager mentioned, including that she was wanting into how knowledge visitors evolves over time and that associated to the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to a research launched by telecoms lobbying group ETNO on Monday, Meta, Alphabet, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Netflix accounted for over 56% of all international knowledge visitors final yr.
The research mentioned an annual contribution of 20 billion euros ($21 billion) to community prices by the tech giants may give a 72-billion-euro increase to the EU economic system. ETNO’s members embody Deutsche Telekom and Orange.
Vestager, nevertheless, gave brief shrift to the telecoms trade’s calls to loosen EU merger guidelines to permit extra consolidation.
“The problem is that the arguments that we hear, like the need for scale in order to invest, they are not new,” she mentioned.
Source: www.financialexpress.com”