For the past two years, the European Commission has been pushing to radically change the internet and telecommunications market in the EU in order to benefit Europe’s largest telecom companies at the expense of innovation, net neutrality, and low broadband prices.
The policy prescriptions have continually included:
- forcing websites and applications to pay ISPs, clearly violating the EU’s net neutrality rules,
- increasing market consolidation and reducing competition, and
- raising the prices that EU residents pay to get online.
In 2023, the Commission tried to justify its positions in a consultation by pretending that the EU was falling behind on 5G and fiber deployments and that there was a shortfall of €180 billion in funding to get to its goals.
It wasn’t true last year, and it’s even less true this year. By all accounts, the EU is on a great path to meet its 2030 goals of 100% 5G and Fiber-to-the-Home coverage in all EU member states.
But despite the good news, the bad policy prescriptions are back: this time, in a White Paper explaining how the EU is falling behind in funding a whole new kind of network that the paper insists is inevitable, a necessity, and a revolution in computing.
The White Paper lacks any evidence any of this is actually going to happen, but states with certainty there’s a new funding gap and that Europe’s digital sovereignty is doomed unless the EU takes up the same bad policy proposals that have already been rejected multiple times.
Ignoring the resounding rejection of proposals to force apps to pay ISPs in last year’s consultation, the Commission now proposes to do so through the backdoor.
It’s still a bad idea.
Here are a few highlights from my response:
"The European Commission ought to be celebrating [the EU’s 5G and fiber progress], but instead the Commission’s reaction is to release a White Paper, which could be entitled Doom and Gloom: The Danger of Europe Becoming a Digital Backwater.
To keep justifying its policy prescriptions, the Commission keeps moving the goal posts and denying the real progress being made. The justification changes, but the wrong prescriptions remain the same:
- force applications to pay fees to ISPs that have never existed before,
- reduce competition by allowing for industry consolidation and eliminating wholesale access to last-mile networks, and
- give ISPs lots of government money to do what they should be doing with their own money.
In other words, it’s Groundhog Day all over again.
…
The White Paper reads like a fevered dream of a mid-level telecom exec who is enamored with buzzwords, is prone to overly confident predictions about the future of technology without any grounding in actual examples, and is extremely allergic to acknowledging his previous predictions didn’t come true.
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In other words, competition and low-priced broadband service need to get sacrificed to build new big complex networks, which will somehow make large industrial players decide to pay for special networks, which they have largely so far declined to do.
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All this new funding and market consolidation, paired with bureaucratic muscle to force applications to pay ISPs as well as new unprecedented regulations on private networks, are, of course, vital to Europe’s future, according to the White Paper.
…
It’s the same old, same old, just dressed up in a new costume."
You can read my full response here. I also recommend reading the responses from ECTA, a coalition of small competitive ISPs, and from BEREC, the EU’s leading telecom agency.
Barbara van Schewick is one of the world's leading experts on net neutrality, a professor at Stanford Law School, and the director of Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society.