BRUSSELS : EU industry chief Thierry Breton on Monday defended a consultation on whether Big Tech should foot the bill for billions of euros of investments in Europe's telecoms infrastructure, saying it was not about putting Big Telecoms' interests above tech companies.
The European Union official said he did not see the issue as"a binary choice between those who provide networks today and those who feed them with the traffic". "And for that we need the connectivity networks – highways – of the future. That is the vision. It is not about whether one vested interest should prevail over another," he said.
Still, Breton took a swipe at the big U.S. tech companies with their large-scale data centres, their cloud-based radio access network - the radio element of a cellular system - and their closed ecosystems.