For the past two years, the European Commission has been pushing to radically change the internet and telecommunications market in the EU in order to benefit Europe’s largest telecom companies at the expense of innovation, net neutrality, and low broadband prices.

The policy prescriptions have continually included:

forcing websites and applications to pay ISPs, clearly violating the EU’s net neutrality rules,
increasing market consolidation and reducing competition, and
raising the prices that EU residents pay to get online.
In 2023, the Commission tried to justify its positions in a consultation by pretending that the EU was falling behind on 5G and fiber deployments and that there was a shortfall of €180 billion in funding to get to its goals.

It wasn’t true last year, and it’s even less true this year. By all accounts, the EU is on a great path to meet its 2030 goals of 100% 5G and Fiber-to-the-Home coverage in all EU member states.

But despite the good news, the bad policy prescriptions are back: this time, in a White Paper explaining how the EU is falling behind in funding a whole new kind of network that the paper insists is inevitable, a necessity, and a revolution in computing.

The White Paper lacks any evidence any of this is actually going to happen, but states with certainty there’s a new funding gap and that Europe’s digital sovereignty is doomed unless the EU takes up the same bad policy proposals that have already been rejected multiple times.

Ignoring the resounding rejection of proposals to force apps to pay ISPs in last year’s consultation, the Commission now proposes to do so through the backdoor.