‘Content providers must financially support ISPs’

Kai-Uwe Ricke, a CEO of Deutsche Telekom, has Thursday said that companies like Google and Yahoo have to spend part of their billions on helping maintain the Internet infrastructure. ‘Companies that earn their money thanks to the internet have to pay for the maintenance of the internet’, says Ricke. Like Verizon foreman John Thorne, the German believes that high-speed connections “cannot exist if customers don’t want to pay and companies like Google don’t want to pay.” Both Thorne and Ricke object to the fact that their companies have invested a fortune in infrastructure, while companies like Google are taking advantage of that with “only cheap servers.”

Ricke is thinking of a ‘quality of service’ that depends on the financial contribution. For example, providers of movies and HDTV streams would have to pay for the construction of new infrastructure, or would have to settle for lower speeds. His company dreads the enormous costs of installing fiber optic networks; for example, three billion would have to be invested before the World Cup to provide the ten largest German cities with a digital high-speed line. Despite the reuse of existing copper connections, offering 50Mbps VDSL lines will also not be cheap, Deutsche Telekom fears.

It is likely that Ricke’s statements are due to European plans to regulate the glass fiber of the internet. “We have not dealt with monopoly companies to replace them with new ones,” said European Commissioner Viviane Reding, who has information technology in her portfolio. However, Ricke believes that the infrastructure companies should be given solid guarantees that they can recoup their investments. Google will also not be happy with the renewed attention to plans to make information providers pay. Their CEO Vinton Cerf recently stated that both consumers and innovation are best served by a ‘free and neutral’ offer of services on the internet.