A recent Financial Times report informs that some of Europe’s top telecoms groups are preparing to fight Google for its ‘bandwidth-hungry’ video sharing service YouTube. Three of Europe’s telecommunication giants Telefónica, France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom are of the opinion that the search giant should pay them for the bandwidth YouTube and Google’s other services consume over their networks. This coalition might also join hands with online content owners such as media groups whose content Google aggregates on its news service for free.

Some European telecom groups even fear that the search giant’s bandwidth-hungry services might potentially reduce their networks into ‘dumb pipes’ because Google pays little or nothing for carrying its services. The new telecommunication coalition is of the point that the present state of affairs, where consumers are charged for access to the internet but websites are exempt from paying for their content that the users consume, should change. According to the report, Europe’s telecom groups are “spending billions of Euros on fixed-line and mobile infrastructure to increase broadband download speeds and network capacity, but some fear they may struggle to secure a return on their investments.”

Google’s data-intensive services like YouTube appear to have become a headache for Europe’s network operators. Telefónica’s chairman César Alierta even demanded that Google start sharing its online ad revenues with the telecom groups so as to compensate the network operators for carrying the search giant’s data-intensive services. He added that Google is freely using Europe’s networks without paying anything to anybody. “Let’s see the development of digital society in terms of the winners and the victims. And today, there is a winner who is Google. There are victims that are content providers, and to a certain extent, network operators. We cannot accept this,” said the new chief executive of France Telecom, Stéphane Richard. Deutsche Telekom’s chief executive René Obermann also expressed the same views.

Google’s response over this was an obvious denial. Rick Whitt, a senior policy director at Google in Washington said that the company “was spending large amounts on its own data networks to carry its traffic to the point where it is handed over to telecoms companies round the world.”