In a fight between the big tech companies and the internet provider giants, it can be very tempting to not care who wins and loses. However, in the case of the ISPs’ “fair share” proposals, ISP victory would mean undermining one of the very foundations of the internet—net neutrality.
After the European Commission held a public consultation on whether they should adopt what they call a “fair share” proposal, they unfortunately voted to move forward with this dangerous plan. This proposal is nothing but a network usage fees regime, which would force certain companies to pay internet service providers (ISPs) for their ability to deliver content to consumers. This idea not only hurts consumers, but also breaks a status quo that facilitated and continues to facilitate the rapid spread of the global internet. Accordingly, we filed comments that called for the European Commission to abandon this completely unfair idea altogether.
The ISP Argument for “Fair Share”
The misguided idea behind the consultation is that large ISPs are suffering mightily because the companies that create and/or deliver information and content online, called content and applications providers (CAPs), are freeriding off the ISPs physical infrastructure networks. The CAPs you may be most familiar with go by another acronym — FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google) — but also encompasses companies who provide many other services.
The ISPs claim they incur costs for delivering this content and that as CAPs push more and more content, those costs increase. They also claim that the increase in internet traffic that has led to increasing costs are in fact caused by the CAPs. Taken together, because the CAPs both cause the traffic and don’t pay for the delivery of their services, CAPs should pay ISPs their “fair share” for using the net
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