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posted by martyb on Tuesday November 30 2021, @10:34AM   Printer-friendly
from the double-triple-quad-penta-hexa-keep-on-dipping-money-pot dept.

Big Tech firms should pay ISPs to upgrade networks, telcos in Europe claim:

The CEOs of 13 large European telecom companies today called on tech giants—presumably including Netflix and other big US companies—to pay for a portion of the Internet service providers' network upgrade costs. In a "joint CEO statement," the European telcos described their proposal as a "renewed effort to rebalance the relationship between global technology giants and the European digital ecosystem."

The letter makes an argument similar to one that AT&T and other US-based ISPs have made at times over the past 15 years, that tech companies delivering content over the Internet get a "free" ride and should subsidize the cost of building last-mile networks that connect homes to broadband access. These arguments generally don't mention the fact that tech giants already pay for their own Internet bandwidth costs and that Netflix and others have built their own content-delivery networks to help deliver the traffic that home-Internet customers choose to receive.


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  • (Score: 2) by stormreaver on Thursday December 02 2021, @04:37PM

    by stormreaver (5101) on Thursday December 02 2021, @04:37PM (#1201546)

    Don't confuse your monopolistic nonsense with provision of all ISPs when classed as an essential service.

    Can you elaborate on what this means? I don't understand.

    Whoever lays the cable/fibre, everyone needs to be able to pay the same price as the ISP who laid it to get access to it.

    I think we largely agree with the basic gist of this. In the model being used by my utility company, though, the utility company is not an ISP. It is more like a common carrier facilitator of ISP's. All ISP's providing service over the common fiber get equal access.

    The US system doesn't work because of the allowance of monopoly, not because of tax/subsidy.

    While I agree with your core premise (ISP monopolies are bad), that is just one of many factors that have lead to the terrible U.S. ISP industry, and which is instantly solved by this model. Our tax money, though, has been (and still is) being given out in HUGE amounts to keep those monopolies entrenched, with no requirements that they actually help the taxpayers. This is something I could easily talk about at great length. The two are intimately intertwined.

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