The royalty proposals to make internet players contribute to the financing of telecoms infrastructure in Europe "do not take into account our investments in content", on which the operators' economic model is based, believe the heads of Meta Kevin Salvadori and Bruno Cendon Martin, in a lengthy blog post posted Thursday, March 23 (Satellifacts, February 27).
Although they say they are "aware of the financial challenges" that European telecom operators must face given current and future challenges (fiber, 5G, virtual reality, metaverse, etc.), the two leaders believe that the idea of imposing network costs to "content providers" such as their group "is not a sustainable solution ". Indeed, according to them, the starting hypothesis of these proposals is "false" in that it does not consider either the value generated by these content creators in the digital ecosystem or the investments they make in the infrastructures of the sector.
Over the past decade, content providers have collectively invested more than $880 billion (€807 billion) in global digital infrastructure, including around $120 billion (€110 billion) per year from 2018 to 2021, according to the figures of Kevin Salvadori and Bruno Cendon Martin. They estimate the annual amount of savings that these investments allow telecommunications operators to make at nearly $6 billion (€5.5 billion).