[ripe-list] European Commission: consultation on 'The future of the electronic communications sector and its infrastructure’

Dear colleagues,

Those following the European Union regulatory landscape might already know, as well as subscribers to the RIPE Cooperation WG mailinglist, but we’d like to draw the broader community's attention to a public consultation published by the European Commission on 'The future of the electronic communications sector and its infrastructure’. The deadline of which is the 19th of May. 

Section 4 of the consultation, 'Fair contribution by all digital players’, states in its introduction:

‘Some electronic communications operators, notably the incumbents, call for the need to establish rules to oblige those content and application providers (“CAPs”) or digital players in general who generate enormous volumes of traffic to contribute to the electronic communications network deployment costs. In their view, such contribution would be “fair” as those CAPs and digital players would take advantage of the high-quality networks but would not bear the cost of their roll-out. 

Conversely, CAPs and other digital players argue that any payments for accessing networks to deliver content or for the amount of traffic transmitted would not only be unjustified, as the traffic is requested by end-users and costs are not necessarily traffic sensitive (notably in fixed networks), but would also endanger the way the internet works and likely breach net neutrality rules.’ (Et cetera)

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/consultations/future-electronic-communications-sector-and-its-infrastructure

Following the announcement that this consultation was going to be held, the RIPE Cooperation WG chairs called for volunteers to form a small task team and work on a draft submission and position paper on behalf of the community. The list of those who signed up was published on the 25th of February: 

https://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/cooperation-wg/2023-February/001648.html

The small task team members have held weekly calls since and started collating arguments, sources and data to formulate a draft response. As stated in the above mentioned email to the Cooperation WG, the team plans 'to share our draft response prior to its submission and we hope to have time allocated at the RIPE86 meeting Coop WG to discuss it further.’ Details on how to provide input for and feedback on the draft response will be announced later.

According to the European Commission the consultation is ‘exploratory’ in nature. However, depending on the outcome, combined with strong lobbying efforts from amongst others the European Telecommunications Network Operators’ Association (ETNO), it could lead to a future EU legislative initiative to intervene because of a perceived imbalance that could negatively impact Europe’s ambitions and the necessary investments in Internet infrastructure to achieve these. As the outcome of this debate is of concern to all operators operating within the European Union, we urge community members to inform themselves about this important topic and engage, if possible, by submitting their own responses to the questionnaire, in particular section 4.

Thank you, and with kind regards,

--

Bastiaan Goslings
Public Policy & Internet Governance

RIPE NCC 
https://www.ripe.net <https://www.ripe.net/>
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