Will Facebook parent Meta resume paying for its use of Deutsche Telekom’s network?

Deutsche Telekom is on a campaign to restore its revenue stream from Meta, which stopped paying DT for the 3.5 terabytes-per-second of data transport capacity it has been using in the carrier’s network since Covid.

“All data traffic from the provider Meta to the Deutsche Telekom network used to run via direct connections for a fee,” said Deutsche Telekom. “During the coronavirus crisis, Meta stopped making these payments. Deutsche Telekom filed a lawsuit against this and was upheld by the Cologne Regional Court. In order to avoid the lawful payments, Meta has decided to route its data traffic via a transit provider to Deutsche Telekom’s network instead of the previous direct route. Meta has failed negotiations for further direct interconnection.

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Deutsche Telekom further stated that “Meta is once again abusing its overwhelming bargaining power to discredit legitimate concerns of the European telecommunications industry and consumers in order to avoid fair payment. This is not just about a difference of opinion between two companies, but about the question of whether the power of the strongest prevails on the Internet or whether there is a fair balance between all participants. We hope that this debate will not be carried out on the backs of the citizens. Even a company like Meta is not above the law.”

Further reading

Meta is not above the law. Corpoorate blog post. September 25, 2024. Deutsche Telekom

Why it matters

Piracy is the act of using copyrighted content without license or permission from the rights holder. Piracy Monitor expands upon that definition by sorting uncompensated use of resources into six categories: Theft of content, of services, of advertising, of software, the compromise of the propriety of individuals, and theft of transport capacity.

“For Meta’s large amounts of data – the company feeds a gigantic 3.5 terabytes into Deutsche Telekom’s network, which corresponds to about 100,000 HD films and all that per second – Deutsche Telekom has done everything in its power to ensure smooth data traffic,” said DT.