Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by DisjointedHunt 1064 days ago
Important to note that the EU Commissioner for the Internal Market is an ex Telecom executive by the name of Thierry Breton who has demonstrated willingness in the past for aggressive regulation to help the telecom companies.

As a recent example, he has advocated levying fees on "Over The Top" services, ie Netflix etc that goes into a fund to pay for the Telecom companies investment into infrastructure.
3 comments
pipo234 1064 days ago
On one hand, I don't think levying OTT fees make much as telcos ought to have been already paid for the bandwidth.

On the other, I also think OTT companies, and in particular VOD companies like Netflix really have no reason to rely on undersea cables in the first place. Simply put: neither netflix, nor any of their customers are located underwater and 99% of their offering is static content. Which means that distribution necessarily relies on CDNs and it's in everyone's interest (Netflix, the telcos and the customer) to access the copy located nearest to the viewer.

So in principle, content should never be delivered to customers using undersea cables and indeed this typically happens only when people use a VPN (to bypass somewhat silly IP licensing restrictions designed by the content owners).

link
toast0 1063 days ago
Netflix needs underseas cables (well, transoceanic links) to serve the critical dynamic content / account state keeping and also to transfer content to CDN nodes. The catalog of content changes regularly.
link
lock-the-spock 1064 days ago
Yes, but the Commission takes decision as a body of 27, not by individual Commissioners. What he might say and what the commission puts forward is different .

Not to mention that the commission in all important matters only makes proposals which are then depending on the topic adopted either by the council (ministers or heads of state of all 27 EU countries) or by council and Parliament.

link
hcks 1064 days ago
What does "Over The Top" even mean, why can’t Telecom companies finance themselves, etc
link
dboreham 1064 days ago
OTT refers to the service being delivered via L3 IP, hence the ISP/Telcom can't block it or charge for it (as they would prefer to in the intests of making more money). So the content is flying "over the top" of their gate.

(Telcos didn't want the internet to exist, with its service neutral model : they wanted to sell "value added" services over their wires).

link