Netflix consumed nearly 20% of French internet traffic in 2021, the Telecoms Regulatory Authority (Arcep) revealed on Thursday, and the American streaming giant is widening the gap with other content providers, called upon in Europe to participate. to the financing of the network. In 2021, “51% of traffic to customers of the main Internet service providers (ISPs) in France will come from five providers: Netflix, Google, Akamai, Facebook and Amazon”, according to the report on the he state of the Internet in France. This very high consumption of network resources by the main players in video streaming (the content distributor Akamai is notably used by Disney+) has been known for years, but Netflix continues to widen the gap. Google and its YouTube platform use just over 10%, Facebook and Amazon (Prime) just over 5%, according to Arcep data. Consequence of the bulimia of catalog films and subscription series, catch-up TV and videos on social networks or advertisements, world internet traffic was made up of 53.7% of video traffic that same year, recalls Arcep, citing data from the company Sandvine. transmission) as low as possible has led several of these players, especially Americans, to equip themselves with their own distribution infrastructure, so as to bring their content closer to users, and to optimize compression formats. from the use of streaming television and the increase in screen resolution, traffic continues to increase, and reached 35.6 terabits per second in 2021, up 25.3% year on year, indicates Arcep. The situation has recently led to s members of the European Commission to resuscitate the idea of making Gafa pay for their use of telecom networks. “This is now one of the main projects in our digital space”, declared in May on Twitter the European Commissioner for internal market, Thierry Breton, who is preparing a dedicated legislative project for the end of the year. However, the subject makes the content providers concerned cringe, who consider that the operators are already paid by their customers, and certain European associations for the defense of digital rights who are concerned about an impact on net neutrality. This principle, enshrined in European Union law in 2016, guarantees equal treatment and routing of all information flows on the Internet.
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