Google Tries To Fend Off Telecom Backed ‘Big Tech Tax’ In EU
from the nobody-gets-a-free-ride dept
We just got done noting how the European Union, prompted by regional telecom monopolies, has been seriously pushing for a new tax on big tech to fund broadband. For decades, telecom giants have lustfully eyed big tech ad revenues. They’ve then convinced politicians that the best way to fix the “digital divide” (lack of broadband) is by taxing tech giants, which telecom giants (falsely) claim get a “free ride.”
AT&T efforts to charge Google extra “just because” started the U.S. net neutrality wars nearly two-decades ago. Now, 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 popped up again in a big way.
The rhetoric is always the same. Some politician, being prodded by a telecom company eager for new subsidies, prattles on at length about how companies like Netflix and Google somehow get a “free ride” on the Internet, despite these companies paying billions of dollars in cloud, transit, bandwidth costs, and other telecom infrastructure (Google even runs its own residential ISP, Google Fiber).
As Europe contemplates taxing tech giants to fund telecom networks in the EU, Google’s Matt Brittin is once again having to remind politicians that Google already pays plenty for bandwidth:
He said Google, owner of YouTube, has done its part to make it more efficient for telecoms providers by carrying traffic 99% of the way and investing millions of euros to do so. “In 2021, we invested over 23 billion euros in capital expenditure – much of which is infrastructure,” Brittin said. These include six large data centres in Europe, 20 subsea cables globally, with five in Europe, and caches to store digital content within local networks in 20 locations in Europe.
These efforts to tax big tech are uniformly being pushed by telecom giants with a long history of abusing taxpayer subsidies by only half-delivering the fiber networks they spent the last 30 years promising. You’ll notice that the politicians pushing for a big tech tax (like FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr here in the US) very rarely support cracking down hard on telecom monopoly subsidy abuse (Carr is routinely, notoriously absent when it comes to AT&T’s multi-decade record of taxpayer fraud, for example).
The whole thing is a big con pushed by captured politicians and driven by telecom lobbyists on the hunt for even more subsidization. Google of course can’t come out and say that, so they’re forced to adopt the various dumb rhetoric politicians have adopted from telecom over the years, such as “sender pays”:
“Introducing a ‘sender pays’ principle is not a new idea, and would upend many of the principles of the open internet,” he said according to the text of a speech to be delivered at a conference organised by telecoms lobbying group ETNO. “These arguments are similar to those we heard 10 or more years ago and we have not seen new data that changes the situation.”
“Big tech should pay big telecom billions of additional dollars for no coherent reason” is literally a 20 year old telecom industry talking point, but who’s counting. And, it should go without saying, that when it comes to giant telecom monopolies, nobody gets a free ride. You pay, and you pay, and you pay, and maybe that money winds up in the form of an actual fiber upgrade. Maybe.
Without reforming telecom monopoly subsidy abuse, any “big tech tax” simply gets thrown in the laps of telecom giants with a generation-long history (both here in the US and in the EU) of subsidy fraud. But politicians like the concept because it not only pleases their campaign contributors in the telecom sector, it earns them easy brownie points as a way to claim they’re fixing the “digital divide.”
Filed Under: big tech, big tech tax, eu, net neutrality, sender pays, telecom
Companies: google
Comments on “Google Tries To Fend Off Telecom Backed ‘Big Tech Tax’ In EU”
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Sender pays is great and would remove the main cost of defending against ddos, also would incentivize cleaning up your network. Count me as in favor of sender pays.
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Why should Google pay for every page it sends you on top of what it pays for its Internet connections, and CDN to reduce the load on ISP trunk routes. If they are forced to pay, will you pay the carriage per page to use them?
As for protection against DDOS, the actual attackers will not care, as it is end user machines and devices that are used to generate the traffic.
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I think a legally enforced “pay by GB sent” would be preferable. At least it makes things more predictable.
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No it does not, and slightly malicious code added to a web page could cause you to send extra GB. Also, and compromised devices on your local network could send GB of data. At least you bill, or you running out of data unexpectedly, would tell you something went wrong.
Further Google already pays for the Gigabytes its sends, and the ISP’s now ant it to also pay them to deliver them on the local network.
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Basically, ISPs want Google to pay to send the data (which it already does) and for both Google and users to pay for the data to be received by the user.
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I’m sorry, but the proposal isn’t “sender pays”.
It’s “sender pays”, “receiver pays”, and “third party middlemen pay” all at once.
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It’s more than the third dip
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Actually, it’s more like “sender overpays”, “receiver overpays”, “third party middlemen pay for the ‘privilege’ of being middlemen”, “sender pays again”
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“Sender pays” is already in place. Or do you think Google’s connections to their bandwidth providers at all their data centers are given to them for free? Google already pays for every byte of bandwidth they send.
The complaint the telecom companies have is that they can’t get their upstream providers to pay them for all the data those upstream providers send to the telecom companies’ networks. But if you ask the telecom companies why that’s so, all you’ll hear is crickets.
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They don’t like the “not getting paid” part of peering, but love the “not paying” part of peering, but feel like there should be money to shake out of the ether in this situation, so they project this ghost opportunity elsewhere in hopes to make it real.
If they were busy building and running networks, they wouldn’t have time for this shit, and would shake their heads at anyone who did.
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Tell us you have no idea what DDOS is without saying you don’t have any idea what DDOS is.
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Gonna need to explain how this DDoS mitigation thing works.
Also need to explain how the cost of defending against DDoS (something the sender does) is removed by the sender… paying for internet transport twice (or more).
And it incentivizes who to clean up their network? How? And how is DDoS (or whatever) mitigated by “cleaning up a network”? What does “cleaning up a network” even mean?
Count me as in favor of the nothing-you-said-makes-any-sense interpretation unless there is other information and evidence such as would allow reassessment.
This will all work out
No need to worry! Once this is done and this policy comes over to the US I’m fairly certain we will see a new line item on our internet bill such as:
Double Charged Tech Companies Credit To Customer: -$50
And this will bring our total bill in line with the advertised cost. I’m roughly 107% certain telecom is really just trying to lower our monthly internet bills after years of hikes. Always looking out for their customers, got to love them!
until the US sorts out the corrupt politicians and then actually forces the telecoms companies to deliver, in an extremely speedy manner, the fiber broadband they take millions of dollars yearly to install/upgrade but give nothing in return, nothing will change! the really pissy thing in this article is how the US telecoms complete fuck up is being exported to the EU and they’re being c**t enough to take notice!!
Have to wonder
did they forget robots.txt?
If they are so damned concerned someone is making money sending them traffic, it’s a simple robots.txt file to stop it. I had cause to test it a bit ago. It took Google about 10 hours to fully de-index the site from search results and it was only crawled twice a day.
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robots.txt grinds IX to a halt, film at 11.
I’m waiting for grocery stores to pay me to take food off their hands, you know… because.
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Funny how socialist techdirt turns capitalist when it comes to Google. Keep sucking that Google dick, techdirt.
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Oh, so you are in favor of disbanding publicly-funded police departments, fire departments, roads, parks, libraries, municipal water/power and those pesky military programs?
Side note: if you’ve ever served, you inadvertently have experienced as close as possible a GQP fantasy socialist ‘paradise’: free food, housing, clothes [officers exempted], guaranteed work and you aren’t allowed to question your betters without a very good reason.
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… hallucinated nobody mentally competent, ever.
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Hey antidirt, how’s that SOPA fund coming along? Ten years and counting!
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Wait, wait, wait. When the fuck did we become socialists? I missed the memo.
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I was not aware Mike is a practicing Marxist!
Oh god! Karl Bode is the reincarnation of Karl Marx! IT ALL MAKES SENSE NOW!
TECHDIRT IS MARXIST!!!!!!111111111oneoneoneONE
(Yes, this IS a joke, for actual legit reasons.)
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Shh hunty, the adults are talking.
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Shh hun, the adults are talking and it’s past your bedtime.
Bandwidth costs
I have honestly no idea what “sender pays” is even supposed to mean. If you have ever tried to buy hosting services anywhere in the past couple decades, you probably got charged for your upload/egress traffic. It seems to me that senders already pay, most of the time. And sometimes they pay a lot:
https://blog.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-costs-around-the-world/
I found this explanation useful:
https://labs.apnic.net/?p=1651
In short, “sender pays” is not about making senders pay. It’s about adopting one side’s preferred interpretation of who should be considered sender or customer.
Charging for actual data does not make a lot of actual sense as the Network has to be built to carry more peak traffic, and costs the same per hour to run whether it is carrying peak traffic, or sitting their idle. The Fibers, switches etc. cost the same to run whether they are busy or idle. A charge for provided bandwidth makes a lot more sense, as it relates to the costs in the rest of the network to carry that bandwidth.
'Have you stopped beating your wife?': the political ploy
The whole thing is a big con pushed by captured politicians and driven by telecom lobbyists on the hunt for even more subsidization. Google of course can’t come out and say that, so they’re forced to adopt the various dumb rhetoric politicians have adopted from telecom over the years, such as “sender pays”:
The problem they face by continuing to pretend that everyone involved is operating in good faith and have legitimate arguments is that they’re allowing the other side to completely control the narrative and are reduced not to rebutting the claims made against them but merely trying to reduce the damage they have to deal with.
‘If you think we’re not paying anything then pay a month’s worth of our bills or admit that you’re using a dishonest argument’ would likely have a lot more impact than starting from the position that the other side is making valid and honest points that deserve serious consideration.