EU ISPs Join US ISPs In Demanding ‘Big Tech’ Give Them Billions For No Coherent Reason

Broadband

from the ain't-gonna-ride-my-pipes-for-free dept

Earlier this year, we noted how FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr had launched a bad faith effort suggesting that “big tech” gets a “free ride” on the internet, and should be forced to fund broadband expansion. Carr’s argument, that companies like Google and Netflix somehow get a free ride (they don’t) and should “pay their fair share” (they already do) is a fifteen year old AT&T lobbyist talking point.

And it’s contagious among telecom executives worldwide. As the EU contemplates its digital policy trajectory for the next decade, the idea that “big tech” should pay “big telecom” for no coherent reason has also managed to unsurprisingly surface:

European Union member countries want tech companies like Google and Netflix to chip in cash for telecoms infrastructure in order to ramp up 5G across the bloc.

Hinting at a future tax for online platforms’ use of telecoms infrastructure, EU capitals wrote that “all market actors benefiting from the digital transformation” should assume their social responsibilities and “make a fair and proportionate contribution to the costs of public goods, services and infrastructures,” according to a text seen by POLITICO.

Telecom monopolies like AT&T want to offload (often neglected or half-completed) network builds and maintenance costs to somebody else to make investors happy. That somebody else is usually taxpayers, who’ve thrown billions in pointless tax breaks and dubious regulatory favors at telecom giants in exchange for fiber networks always (so mysteriously!) left half completed and jobs that never arrive.

AT&T’s quest to “double dip” here (get paid for bandwidth up front then paid extra… just because) has been pretty much never ending. It’s basically what started the whole net neutrality fight (Google, which already pays plenty for bandwidth, should pay us extra if they want their traffic to reach consumers on a timely basis!). And it’s rhetoric that’s been adopted globally in the years since.

It’s easy to dress this all up as something far more noble that it actually is. For example, what’s really happening is that telecom lobbyists are influencing corrupt lawmakers to suggest that “big tech” should throw billions at “big telecom.” What it’s portrayed as is a good faith effort to shore up funding of essential infrastructure and close the digital divide, be it in the EU or U.S.

The tell is that the underlying rhetoric is always false, and always the same. Basically, that “big tech” gets a “free ride” on the internet and should give telecom giants money for some mysterious reason:

“There are players who generate a lot of traffic that then enables their business but who have not been actually contributing to enable that traffic; they have not been contributing to enabling the investments in the rollout of connectivity,” said Commission Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager on May 5.

Telecoms companies have been complaining for more than a decade that Google’s YouTube and Netflix have been getting a free ride on costly infrastructure, while tech companies counter that they’re indirectly contributing through content consumers’ internet subscription payments. Major firms like Google and Facebook have also ramped up their investment in undersea internet cables, the world’s digital information pipelines.

Functional news outlets would normally step in here to note that Google and Netflix don’t get a free ride on the Internet (when it comes to telecom monopolies, nobody does). They not only pay billions of dollars for cloud storage and their own bandwidth, they own countless billions in transit routes, content delivery networks, and undersea fiber transit routes.

Again, if policymakers like Carr and Vestager were truly interested in the cost-efficient financing of broader broadband deployment, their very first proposal would be a massive reform of the billions in subsidies, tax breaks, and regulatory favors thrown at telecom monopolies in repeated exchange for half-completed networks and layoffs. But they don’t do that for what should be fairly obvious reasons.

That’s not to say that there aren’t a lot of important discussions to be had on financing equitable and affordable broadband deployment. Just that telecom monopoly lobbyists have a knack for infecting the discourse to nab additional handouts for an already subsidy-slathered telecom industry, then somehow dressing this all up as altruism.

Filed Under: big tech, big telecom, broadband, corruption, digital divide, eu