Vodafone India has joined other telecom companies, including Airtel and Aircel, to demand revenue share from Internet service firms like Google and Facebook.
Vodafone India’s Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer Marten Pieters told Business Line that the company would like to have a regulation in place that would make it mandatory for over-the-top players such as Google to pay connectivity charges to telecom companies.
“It’s a strange business model at present where telecom operators invest huge amounts of money to upgrade data networks and players like YouTube, who gets the revenue, don’t pay anything,” Pieters said.
Globally, telecom companies have been putting pressure on regulators to find a resolution to this issue. The main grouse is while telcos invest billions of dollars in setting up telecom networks, over-the-top service providers ride on these networks to make billions of dollars in revenue.
Content providers such as Google have been endorsing network neutrality on grounds that the Internet is free, hence should not be controlled by regulation. Supporters of this view argue that telecom companies’ data networks are being consumed because of services offered by the likes of YouTube.
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Vodafone India’s Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer Marten Pieters told Business Line that the company would like to have a regulation in place that would make it mandatory for over-the-top players such as Google to pay connectivity charges to telecom companies.
“It’s a strange business model at present where telecom operators invest huge amounts of money to upgrade data networks and players like YouTube, who gets the revenue, don’t pay anything,” Pieters said.
Globally, telecom companies have been putting pressure on regulators to find a resolution to this issue. The main grouse is while telcos invest billions of dollars in setting up telecom networks, over-the-top service providers ride on these networks to make billions of dollars in revenue.
Content providers such as Google have been endorsing network neutrality on grounds that the Internet is free, hence should not be controlled by regulation. Supporters of this view argue that telecom companies’ data networks are being consumed because of services offered by the likes of YouTube.
Read More