The EU wants tech giants to pay for bandwidth

Will Netflix, Amazon, or even Apple soon have to pay for everyone to have 5G and fiber? In any case, this is what the European Union has been thinking for several months. And according to Bloomberg, the plan to charge companies whose services consume the most bandwidth in the future is well advanced.

The goal? That these companies contribute to the payment of the next infrastructures that allow to obtain Internet but above all a 5G and fiber network throughout Europe.

Too much data usage

The European Union also wants the creation of a mandatory system of direct payment from companies to telecommunications operators. Orange or Vodafone, in particular, could be affected.

Big tech companies, particularly streaming services, consume a lot of bandwidth, so you can watch videos in very good quality, for example. And the increasing use of high-powered, high-quality technology services, such as 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 at the moment and should only arrive by 2025. The body has yet to position itself on the threshold of used bandwidth from which a company can be called a “big traffic generator”. “.

“We see that some players generate a lot of traffic by allowing their business to exist, but not actually contributing to making this traffic work. The question of a fair contribution to the networks must be considered very carefully,” said the vice president. the president of the European Commission, Margrethe Vestager, during a press conference in May 2022 with Thierry Breton.

Therefore, the project is not new. For several months now, the EU has been trying to convince the technological players to invest, but also the different regulators and associations for the defense of Internet freedoms that this development is necessary. During the evocation of the project, the latter had expressed their fears about a danger of the neutrality of the web, where the big rich players could be favored to the detriment of the smaller sites.