Vodafone has asked the EU to facilitate bilateral agreements between telecom operators and online content providers like Google. Specifically, Vodafone wants telecoms operators to be able to charge online content providers variable prices, depending on the network quality they desire, Vodafone Spain president Francisco Roman said at a local conference, reported by Spanish paper Expansion. According to Roman, the operators are investing large amounts each year in the deployment of networks used by their customers, and they must pay for services based on usage. If Google does not pay, the end users will have to. On the debate over network neutrality, the Vodafone executive said the US discussion "suggests erecting walls" between service providers and online content providers in order to preserve an open internt. However, this could limit diversity of the system and undermine service quality, Roman said. Currently, around 20 percent of internet users cover nearly 80 percent of the traffic. Consequently, maintaining a system in which everyone is charged the same, regardless of their internet consumption or use, will eventually result in network collapse, the Vodafone executive said. Vodafone is finalizing the details of the document to be presented in the coming days at the public consultation on network neutrality opened by EU information society commissioner Neelie Kroes. In the document, Vodafone will advocate for the right of European operators to charge online content providers an extra fee. Vodafone considers that, at present, telecom operators already have such agreements with their end-users. For example, Vodafone has started offering a mobile broadband system which gives high-speed priority to premium users, while maintaining the contracted speed rate for the remaining mobile internet user base. Vodafone now plans to implement the same network management system, with variable prices for different service qualities, to internet giants like Google, Yahoo or Microsoft. The 'Google tax' debate started in February, when Telefonica's chairman Cesar Alierta said the operator was planning to charge search engines for access and use of its networks. Internet search engines "use the Telefonica networks without paying anything at all, which is good for them and bad for us. It's obvious that this situation must change", Alierta said at a press conference in Bilbao in February. "We [Telefonica] deploy the networks, we do the peering, we provide the systems, customer care, after-sales and line installation services ... we do it all. They have algorithms and content," Alierta said.
