New EU telecom guidelines will go away everybody worse off – POLITICO

Carl Gahnberg is the Director of Coverage Improvement & Analysis on the Web Society.

The European Fee has launched a public session on new telecom guidelines that threaten to inflict critical harm on the know-how we use to speak, conduct enterprise and interact with the broader world on daily basis — the Web.

The announcement of “The way forward for the digital communications sector and its infrastructure” was the anticipated subsequent step in a debate on laws, which might require on-line providers to contribute to telecom operators’ investments in new infrastructure throughout the Continent. It’s a response to calls from giant telecom operators that content material suppliers — reminiscent of Meta, Netflix and Alphabet — make a “honest contribution” to infrastructure investments like 5G.

The logic goes that since a big portion of site visitors on the networks is “generated” by these massive suppliers, they need to additionally must contribute to the infrastructure — nevertheless, this premise is essentially flawed. Visitors emanating from content material suppliers comes from particular person customers requesting information, and it’s these customers paying their Web Service Supplier (ISP) for entry to the Web that drives the site visitors — not the opposite means spherical.

And if accepted, these proposed guidelines could be a catastrophe for the Web as we all know it, undermining present internet neutrality laws, shifting prices to end-users, consolidating the place of huge tech firms, and probably even triggering a fragmentation of the Web.

Whereas the Fee has not but produced a concrete proposal, the thought right here is centered on an previous regime often known as “sender pays.” Revealingly, the concepts for this mannequin are impressed by the previous phone system and have rightly been rejected earlier than as outdated for the digital age.

In October final yr, the Physique of European Regulators for Digital Communications even revealed a preliminary evaluation on the matter, concluding that there’s “no proof that such mechanism is justified,” and that “such a major change may very well be of serious hurt to the web ecosystem.”

The Web’s good design is that when a community has related to it, that community is reachable by any person or service on the planet. It’s how the Web reached international scale — one contract is enough to achieve all elements of it, no matter distance or geography.

Thus, the concept that content material suppliers would require a separate contract with a community on the opposite facet of the world to ship site visitors is in direct battle with the very essence of the Web. Think about establishing an internet site in the US, India or Brazil, however for European customers to entry your website, you must first set up a separate contract with every of their ISPs. That’s baffling.

As customers, we’d not be connecting to the worldwide Web however a community of contractual relationships that our ISP has concluded, and people contracts may not embody sure providers or international locations and even complete areas — it will be an Web divided in response to company pursuits.

Proponents of the brand new guidelines might, after all, argue that such issues are exaggerated. Absolutely a Google, Fb or Netflix can simply afford the price?

Maybe that’s the case. However the extra probably end result is that elevated prices for content material suppliers could be handed on to shoppers, by growing, for instance, the worth of streaming subscriptions.

Additional nonetheless, the bigger affect of a brand new settlement mannequin could be systemic. As many organizations have warned, it will undermine present internet neutrality laws and the rights of European customers to freely entry an open Web.

In impact, Europeans would solely have entry to the providers their telecom supplier reached an settlement with, which might merely consolidate the place of deep-pocketed Silicon Valley giants additional, as they’d be the one ones who may afford it. And new, rising content material suppliers would as an alternative focus their investments on different areas of the world.

It’s additionally arduous to not envision this regime broadening. If new laws are based mostly on the precept that on-line providers should pay for the site visitors requested by customers, then why not broaden the obligations to all providers we entry on the Web? It’s a slippery slope, with no means again.

The Web belongs to nobody, which implies it belongs to everybody — this we all know. Nevertheless it doesn’t function in a vacuum both, and laws matter.

The EU has proved international management on key Web points, most importantly with Normal Information Safety Regulation, which has impressed related guidelines in different elements of the world. Paradoxically, Europe has additionally been a number one supporter of internet neutrality, embodied within the Open Web Entry Laws, now threatened by its personal telecoms proposal.

The EU’s place on the vanguard of tech regulation has given it monumental energy over how the worldwide group responds to the challenges of the Web age. However undermining the Web’s basic rules can’t be accepted as collateral harm, and Europe ought to reject such insurance policies earlier than inflicting any irreversible harm.

The EU has the ability to steer the world right here — it simply wants to decide on the precise path.