Telecoms go to war against Netflix and other bigtechs – 04/30/2023 – Panel SA

The biggest telecoms in Brazil —Claro, Vivo and Tim— are lobbying Congress to force technology giants, such as Netflix and Google, to pay a fee whenever data consumption on operators’ networks grows more than expected by the sector . There are two strategies, according to parliamentarians heard by the Panel SA

On one front, operators are seeking new legislation, creating the possibility of charging. Today, negotiation is free between the parties.

In another field, they use 5G to change the Marco Civil da Internet so that the so-called traffic management is explicit in the law.

With that, they want, for example, to reduce the bandwidth of Netflix when the consumption of their movies and series exceeds a ceiling to be defined.

Banda is like a lane of highway where teles transmit data. In the case in question, if the highway has four lanes, they want to narrow the flow of Netflix data, for example, to three or two lanes, leaving the others free for other users of the network.

When this occurs, however, the image quality of the videos may suffer.

In another field, operators defend that, in order to guarantee the stability and speed of fifth generation signals in sensitive applications, such as autonomous cars and remote surgeries, they will not be able to run the risk of “surprises” in their networks.

Today, the legislation says that, depending on the type of traffic management, reducing the bandwidth of some user (a big tech, for example) can constitute discrimination, which violates the internet framework.

Brazilian operators embraced this idea inspired by telecoms in Korea, which went to court against Netflix to guarantee the right to manage the flow of their films.

In Brazil, bigtechs have always been resistant to this charge. This time, in response to the telecasts’ lobby, their representatives tell the congressmen that the networks operate with slack capacity and that, therefore, their content is not a risk.

They also point out that the content transmitted by them is what drives traffic and the prices charged to end users for data packages already cover the total costs.

Julio wiziack with Paulo Ricardo Martins It is Diego Felix

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