(Bloomberg) —
Through the “huge” growth of internet traffic, Big Tech is “forcing” phone companies to invest heavily in improving networks while not helping to meet the cost, said Orange SA CEO Christel Heydemann.
“We are condemned to invest in infrastructure,” Heydemann said Saturday at the Recontres Economiques conference in Aix-en-Provence, France. She added that network traffic is expected to “multiply by three or five” times in the next six years.
That huge growth is “essentially captured by a few players, the big content providers, five players that force us to invest,” she said.
Without naming Netflix Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Meta Platforms Inc.
or Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Heydemann said a future challenge would be work with large tech companies that she said are “forcing certain behaviors” on their users.
Also speaking at the conference, Orange CFO Ramon Fernandez added that technology giants “hardly participate in the deployment of infrastructure” when, in the next four years, some “15 billion euros ($15.3 billion) of added investment will be required to absorb traffic growth” in Europe.
The EU started evaluating this spring whether big internet companies should share the cost of building out 5G infrastructure.
“This fight” for making them pay a fair share “will be very complicated but existential,” Fernandez said.
Read more: EU’s Vestager Presses Idea to Make Tech Firms Pay Telecom Costs
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