Europe considers making 'Big Tech' pay for building the internet

Matt Brittin, Google's President of EMEA, said at an event in Brussels that it'll be customers who pay "either with price or pay in worse services," if Europe adds a streaming fee.

When binge-watching TV became a universal pastime at the height of the pandemic, one of Europe’s top officials called the chief executive officer and co-founder of Netflix and told him to make his product worse.  
 

Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton wanted Netflix to reduce the quality of its videos to free up bandwidth, fearing that Europe’s networks were under strain. Reed Hastings complied, cutting data output by about 25% for a month. So did YouTube.
 

It didn’t matter there was little evidence that networks were overloaded, or the fact Netflix already adapts video quality based on the capacity of the