While the French telecommunications federation has been calling for it for a long time, Laure de la Raudière, president of Arcep, believes that it could be a good idea to strengthen Google, Netflix and others.
This is a topic that is being addressed more and more regularly by operators. With the explosion of digital uses that does not seem to stop, Orange, Free, SFR, Bouygues and other European telcos are asking the main network services to go to the cash register, as they alone would represent 55% of online traffic in 2021 in Europe .
Laure de La Raudière spoke about this last Wednesday and seems to be going in the direction of the operators. She claims to find “legitimate the debate about the responsibility of + Gafam + (acronym denoting Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft) for the increase in traffic on the networks.” While some would say that only the operators’ subscribers are responsible for their use of Internet access, they nevertheless believe that “it is also to forget that the business model of these large content providers is based on an economy of attention that generates more and more video streams (…) more and more bandwidth consumption“.
“Therefore, making these actors responsible for the continuous increase in data volumes on the Internet seems interesting to me, especially because of the impact of this data on the environment.“
Laure de la Raudière – Chairman of Arcep
French operators are demanding 2 billion euros from the digital giants for their massive use of the infrastructures installed and maintained by Orange, Free, Bouygues and SFR. The local authorities, who are also responsible for the expansion and maintenance of fiber networks within the framework of Public Initiative Networks, would like to have a piece of the pie.
So far, however, the government has not yet commented on this proposal, other than declaring that it supports the launch of a European consultation next year. “We hope that this will lead, as soon as possible, to constructive proposals that will help us finance these significant investment efforts that lie ahead. ” confirmed this Tuesday Jean Noël Barrot, ministerial delegate responsible for digital and telecommunications
. However, there is no consensus on the proposal to tax the GAFAs, AOTA for example explained that it did not think it was a good idea. “Operators are already paid by their customers“, for his part, had replied the vice-president of CCIA, which represents the industries within information and communication technologies, of which “Gafam” are members.
Source: AFP
This article was taken from the Univers FreeBox website