CISPE, the Association of Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers in Europe, highlights the significance of a recent complaint, submitted by German consumer and digital rights advocates against Deutsche Telekom (DT) with the German telecommunications Regulator (BnetzA).
The complaint, which was made public on 25 April, alleges that Deutsche Telekom has been violating European Net Neutrality rules by creating artificial congestion and then demanding significant payments to ‘resolve’ the issue.
Upon first reading, this allegation mirrors grievances that we have been hearing from multiple European cloud providers the past decade. Since at least 2015, several CISPE members flagged to us what they suspect to be artificial network service quality degradation in Germany, used as a way to demand additional unjustified payments from them. The reason these companies never officially submitted a complaint is because they feared retaliation and getting tangled up in costly legal proceedings.
As the European Commission develops its Digital Networks Act (DNA), it must carefully analyse this complaint and recognise what was already highlighted by BEREC in their recent report on IP interconnection – namely that the very few interconnection disputes that exist are all directly caused by breaches of the 2015 Open Internet Regulation. Since such practices are already illegal, there is no need to further regulate interconnection in the DNA.
Consequently, we urge the Commission to refrain from pursuing proposals that could inadvertently legitimise such practices, for example the extension of interconnection dispute mechanisms to cloud providers. Besides potentially undermining net neutrality protections, such proposals also risk raising costs and lowering service quality for European businesses and consumers — outcomes that directly conflict with Europe’s digital transformation objectives.
