Tensions between European telecommunications firms and U.S. Big Tech companies have crested, as telecom bosses mount pressure on regulators to make digital giants fork up some of the cost of building the backbone of the internet.
European telcos argue that large internet firms, mainly American, have built their businesses on the back of the multi-billion dollar investments that carriers have made in internet infrastructure.
The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, opened a consultation last month examining how to address the imbalance. Officials are seeking views on whether to require a direct contribution from internet giants to the telco operators.
Big Tech firms say this would amount to an “internet tax” that could undermine net neutrality.
What are telco giants saying?
Top telecom bosses came out swinging at the tech companies during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
They bemoaned spending billions on laying cables and installing antennas to cope with rising internet demand without corresponding investments from Big Tech.
“Without the telcos, without the network, there is no Netflix, there is no Google,” Michael Trabbia, chief technology and innovation officer for France’s Orange, told CNBC. “So we are absolutely vital, we are the entry point to the digital world.”
In a Feb. 27 presentation, the CEO of German telecom group Deutsche Telekom, Tim Hoettges, showed audience members a rectangular illustration, representing the scale of market capitalization among different industry participants. U.S. giants dominated this map.
Tim Hoettges, CEO of Deutsche Telekom, delivers a keynote at Mobile World Congress.
Angel Garcia | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Hoettges asked attendees why these companies couldn’t “at least a little bit, contribute to the efforts and the infrastructure which we are building here in Europe.”
Howard Watson, chief technology officer of BT, said he sees merit in a fee for the large tech players.
“Can we get a two-sided model to work, where the customer pays the operator, but also the content provider pays the operator?” Watson told CNBC last week. “I do think we should be looking at that.”
Watson drew an analogy to Google and Apple’s app stores, which charge developers a cut of in-app sales in return to use their services.
What have U.S. tech firms said?
Efforts to implement network fees have been strongly criticized — not least by tech companies.
Speaking on Feb. 28 at MWC, Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters labeled proposals to make tech firms pay internet service providers for network costs an internet traffic “tax,” which would have an “adverse effect” on consumers.
Greg Peters, Co-CEO of Netflix, speaks at a keynote on the future of entertainment at Mobile World Congress 2023.
Joan Cros | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Requiring the likes of Netflix — which already spends heavily on content delivery — to pay for network upgrades would make it harder to develop popular shows, Peters said.
Tech firms say that carriers already receive money to invest in infrastructure from their customers — who pay them via call, text and data fees — and that, by asking internet companies to pay for carriage, they effectively want to get paid twice.
Consumers may end up absorbing costs asked of digital content platforms, and this could ultimately “have a negative impact on consumers, especially at a time of price increases,” Matt Brittin, Google’s head of EMEA, said in September.
Tech firms also argue that they are already making large investments in European telco infrastructure, including subsea cables and server farms.
Rethinking ‘net neutrality’
The “fair share” debate has sparked some concern that the principles of net neutrality — which say the internet should be free, open, and not give priority to any one service — could be undermined. Telcos insist they’re not trying to erode net neutrality.
Technology firms worry that those who pay more for infrastructure may get better network access.
Google’s Brittin said that fair share payments “could potentially translate into measures that effectively discriminate between different types of traffic and infringe the rights of end users.”
One suggestion is to require individual bargaining deals with the Big Tech firms, similar to Australian licensing models between news publishers and internet platforms.
“This has nothing to do with net neutrality. This has nothing to do with access to the network,” said Sigve Brekke, CEO of Telenor, told CNBC on Feb. 27. “This has to do with the burden of cost.”
Short-term solution?
Carriers gripe that their networks are congested by a huge output from tech giants. One solution is to stagger content delivery at different times to ease the burden on network traffic.
Digital content providers could time a new blockbuster movie or game releases more efficiently, or compress the data delivered to ease the pressure off networks.
“We could just start with having a clear schedule of what’s coming when, and being able to have a dialogue as to whether companies are using the most efficient way of carrying the traffic, and could certain non-time critical content be delivered at different times?” Marc Allera, CEO of BT’s consumer division, told CNBC.
“I think that’s a pretty, relatively easy debate to be had, actually, although a lot of the content is global, and what might be busy in one country and one time may or may not be busy in another. But I think at a local level is certainly a really easy discussion to have.”
He suggested the net neutrality concept needs a bit of a refresh.
Not a ‘binary choice’
The “fair share” debate is as old as time. For over a decade, telecom operators have complained about over-the-top messaging and media services like WhatsApp and Skype “free riding” on their networks.
At this year’s MWC, there was one notable difference — a high-ranking EU official in the room.
Thierry Breton, internal market commissioner for the European Union, delivers a keynote at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
Angel Garcia | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Thierry Breton, head of internal markets for the European Commission, said the bloc must “find a financing model for the huge investments needed” in the development of next-generation mobile networks and emerging technologies, like the metaverse.
Breton said it was important not to undermine net neutrality and that the debate should not be characterized as a “binary choice” between internet service providers and Big Tech firms.
Breton’s presence at MWC appeared to reflect the bloc’s sympathies toward Big Telecom, according to Paolo Pescatore, tech, media and telecom analyst at PP Foresight.
“The challenge in Europe is it’s not that clear cut because you have an imbalance,” Pescatore said. “The imbalance is not down to Big Tech, it’s not down to streamers, and it’s not down to telcos. It’s down largely to the old, out-of-date regulatory environment.”
A lack of cross-border consolidation and stagnating revenues in the telecoms sector created a “perfect concoction that’s unfavorable to telcos,” he said.
“A potential landing zone for resolution is a framework for telcos to negotiate individually with the tech firms that generate the heaviest traffic,” Ahmad Latif Ali, European telecommunications insights lead at IDC, told CNBC. “However, this is a highly contested situation.”
Eric Baker, co-founder and CEO of Ticket reseller StubHub, rings the opening bell during his company’s IPO at the New York Stock Exchange in New York City, U.S., September 17, 2025.
Brendan McDermid | Reuters
StubHub shares opened at $25.35in their New York Stock Exchange debut on Wednesday after the online ticket seller priced its IPO in the middle of its expected range.
The pricing late Tuesday at $23.50 per share raised $800 million for the company, now trading under ticker symbol “STUB.”
StubHub’s long-awaited IPO comes after the company paused its plans in April, when President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs sent the stock market into a tailspin. It was the second such delay, after market volatility forced StubHub to temporarily shelve its IPO plans in July 2024.
The IPO is the latest in a flurry of tech offerings as the market rebounds from a dismal few years. Swedish buy now, pay later firm Klarna and Gemini, the crypto firm founded by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, rose in their respective debuts last week. Peter Thiel-backed cryptocurrency exchangeBullish, design software company Figma and stablecoin issuer Circle have also hit the market in recent months.
StubHub has been through a number of transactions in its 25-year history to get to this point. It was purchased by eBay for $310 million in 2007, but was reacquired by its co-founder Eric Baker in 2020 for roughly $4 billion through his new company Viagogo.
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StubHub has benefited from a resurgence in the live events market in the years following the Covid lockdowns. Sales have also boomed from massively popular shows like Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour and Beyoncé’s Renaissance Tour, as well as sporting events like the Super Bowl.
The company said in its updated prospectus filed last month that those sorts of events can also make StubHub’s revenues lumpy and difficult to predict.
In the first quarter, StubHub reported revenue growth of 10% from a year earlier to $397.6 million. Its net loss widened to $35.9 million from $29.7 million a year ago. Gross merchandise sales, which represent the total dollar value paid by ticket buyers, reached $2.08 billion in the three months ended March 31.
StubHub primarily generates revenue from connecting buyers with ticket resellers. More than 40 million tickets were sold on StubHub’s marketplace last year from roughly one million sellers, the company said in August.
The Federal Trade Commission is in the advanced stages of probing Ticketmaster over whether it’s done enough to keep automated bots from circumventing its per-person ticket limits for popular events, Bloomberg reported Monday, citing people familiar with the matter.
The FTC in May sent a warning letter to StubHub saying it must comply with the agency’s “junk fees” rule and alleging some of its ticket listings failed to display the total price, including all mandatory fees and charges.
Madrone Partners is StubHub’s largest investor with ownership of 24.5% of Class A shares prior to the offering. WestCap is second at 12.3%, followed by Bessemer Venture Partners at 8.8%.
It’s been a decade since Kayvon Beykpour sold Periscope to Twitter for a reported $100 million, allowing the social media site to jump into livestreaming.
Twitter shuttered Periscope in 2021, and the parent company, now called X and owned by Elon Musk, gravitated to a live events product called Spaces.
Meanwhile, Beykpour, who spent seven years at Twitter after the acquisition, is back with Macroscope. He said on Wednesday that he’s raised $40 million from venture investors, including GV (formerly Google Ventures), Lightspeed Venture Partners and Thrive Capital.
While Periscope targeted a consumer audience, Macroscope is going squarely after businesses. Beykpour’s idea is to help software developers easily spot issues in their code, and show managers what their engineers are doing.
Beykpour said the lack of transparency in the software development process was a big problem in his former gig.
“So much of my job as the head of product at Twitter was just understanding what the hell was happening,” Beykpour, said in an interview. “You have all these engineers at the company and all these very important things that we need to get done with absolute opaqueness around, like, What progress did we make? What are all these people working on?”
He said the startup set out to help product leaders first and added features for programmers later.
Macroscope integrates with Microsoft-owned GitHub’s source code repositories and project management software from Atlassian and Linear. Its technology connects to artificial intelligence models from Anthropic, Google and OpenAI that can propose alternative code and answer questions from developers and product executives.
Products like GitHub Copilot and Cursor’s BugBot already can review code with help from AI. Beykpour said that in testing Macroscope outperformed competitors when it came to correctly identifying known software bugs.
And when it comes to tools to help managers stay on top of developers’ activity, there’s not much available, Beykpour said.
“They’re solving it with meetings,” he said. “If we cannot surpass the bar of, people call a meeting to ask a bunch of engineers what’s happening, we’ve failed miserably.”
Macroscope costs $30 per developer per month, which includes the status-checking components for bosses, while Cursor is priced at $32 per month when purchased annually.
Early users include film studio A24, online learning startup Class and probiotics company Seed Health.
Beykpour started Macroscope in 2023 with Periscope co-founder Joseph Bernstein and Rob Bishop, founder of AI startup Magic Pony, which Twitter acquired in 2016. The company has 17 employees and is based in San Francisco.
StubHub CEO Eric Baker said Wednesday that recently introduced federal regulations around transparent ticket pricing will cause a “one-time” hit to its financial results.
Revenue is expected to dip year over year as consumers digest the new rules, Baker told CNBC, which require online ticket sellers to prominently show the total cost upfront.
“We’ve seen this in states like New York that have done it. You have a drop off and it hits about 10%. … Then it’s just back to normal,” Baker said in an interview with CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street.” “You’re growing off the base because you now normalized it. So it’s just a one-time hit to conversion, resets the market, and then onward and upward you go.”
The online ticket marketplace is expected to begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday under the symbol “STUB.”
StubHub late Tuesday priced its IPO at $23.50, landing at the midpoint of the expected range it gave last week of $22 to $25. The share sale values the company at $8.6 billion.
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Online ticket sellers such as StubHub, Live Nation’s Ticketmaster and Vivid Seats have had to adjust to the Federal Trade Commission’s “junk fees” rule that took effect in May.
The rule “prohibits bait-and-switch pricing and other tactics used to hide total prices and mislead people about fees in the live-event ticketing and short-term lodging industries,” the agency said.
D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb sued StubHub last August for “predatory drip pricing,” or deceptively advertising low prices for tickets, while a countdown clock creates a false sense of urgency and the total cost at checkout climbs “vastly higher than the originally advertised ticket price.”
Baker said the company has advocated for ticket providers to have “all-in pricing.”
“If you’re the only person in the market doing it for the reasons I said, you end up with a problem,” Baker said. “So now that everyone’s doing it, everyone’s happier, and you have a level playing field.”
The San Francisco-based company was co-founded by Baker in 2000, and was acquired by eBay for $310 million seven years later. Baker reacquired StubHub in 2020 for roughly $4 billion through his new company Viagogo.
StubHub delayed its planned IPO in April as President Donald Trump‘s sweeping tariffs jolted markets.