Last year, due to the impact of the epidemic, most people worked from home, which also led to a significant increase in the use of online video, social interaction, streaming video services and games, resulting in a significant increase in overall network transmission traffic. Therefore, European telecom operatorsThen called onIn a joint statement issued earlier, telecom operators in France, Italy, and Spain said they would ask the European Commission to introduce legislation requiring large technology companies to fund the network infrastructure of telecom operators in the EU.
According to the joint statement of these telecom operators, services provided by companies such as Google, Meta, and Netflix account for approximately 55% of Internet traffic within EU countries, requiring European telecom operators to expand network resources in order to maintain stable operation of network transmission services. At the same time, they also emphasized the huge cost of investing in the construction of 5G networks and fiber optic networks.
In this situation, telecom operators are calling on large technology companies to share the huge operating costs incurred by their services due to the large amount of network transmission volume. They also hope that the European Commission will legislate on this and require large technology companies to share the additional costs incurred by telecom operators for their services through formal regulations.
In the joint statement, it was also emphasized that this move was to ensure fairness for other Internet users, rather than allowing a specific user group to occupy a large amount of Internet transmission bandwidth, thereby affecting the rights and interests of other Internet users.
Although relevant research suggests that if large technology companies subsidize maintaining the network stability of telecom operators in EU countries, assuming an annual subsidy of 200 billion euros, it will enable EU countries to generate economic benefits of up to 720 billion euros, there are also views that once large technology companies contribute to sharing the network construction and operating costs of telecom operators in the EU, it may further affect network neutrality, and the strength of the regulations originally intended by the EU for large technology companies may be weakened.
