Breton says big telecom companies are not favored over tech companies

By Foo Yun Chee

BRUSSELS, Feb 27 (Reuters) – EU internal market chief Thierry Breton on Monday defended a consultation on whether big tech companies should foot the bill for billions of euros in investments in European telecoms infrastructure, saying it was not about putting the interests of big telecom companies above tech companies.

The motion launched last week pits Deutsche Telekom AG, Orange SA, Telefónica SA and Telecom Italia SpA against Google, Apple Inc, Meta Platforms Inc, Netflix Inc, Amazon.com Inc and Microsoft Corp.

The senior European Union official said he did not see the issue as “a binary choice between those who provide the networks today and those who feed them traffic”.

“For me, the real challenge is to ensure that by 2030 our citizens and businesses on our streets across the EU – including here in Barcelona – have access to fast, reliable and feature-rich Gigabit connectivity. data,” he said. in the text of a speech he will deliver at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in the Spanish city.

“And for that, we need the connectivity networks – the highways – of the future. That’s the vision. It’s not about whether one particular interest should prevail over another,” he said. .

The Dutch government on Monday warned against imposing an internet toll on tech companies, the first in the EU to criticize Breton’s plan after it was unveiled on Thursday, saying such a move could breach neutrality rules net and lead to higher prices for Europeans.

However, Breton lashed out at big US tech companies, with their large-scale data centers, cloud-based radio access network (RAN) – the radio element of a cellular system – and their ecosystems. closed.

“We are seeing cloud and platform hyperscalers leveraging their market dominance to enter the telecom space, using their cash reserves to develop cloud RANs and offer direct services to enterprises,” he said. -he declares.

“And interoperability or openness is not currently a strong feature of their business model.”

He called for a serious discussion of potential obstacles to cross-border telecoms consolidation, siding with operators who say strict EU merger rules prevent deals, and also spoke of the benefits of an integrated radio spectrum market.

“In my opinion, these two issues are currently holding back our collective potential compared to other continents,” Breton said.

(Reporting by Foo Yun Chee; Editing by Jonathan Oatis, Editing in Spanish by José Muñoz in Gdansk Newsroom)