European Union competition regulators have closed their year-long investigation into Deutsche Telekom, Orange and Telefónica for allegedly choking off traffic from certain providers in favour of their own services.
“The Commission found no evidence of behaviour aimed at foreclosing transit services from the market or at providing an unfair advantage to the telecoms operators’ own proprietary content services,” the EU said.
EU officials raided the offices of the three companies in July last year as part of an investigation into whether the telcos were restricting access to the internet to companies that offered services using large amounts of data.
At the time the EU described the raids as part of a competition investigation into “a number of telecommunications companies” in several EU countries over potential abuse of an alleged dominant market position. The EU did not name the companies it was investigating, but the groups confirmed they had been raided.
The investigation followed a complaint by US bandwidth provider Cogent Communications that Orange was restricting access to its content by privileging the traffic of its subsidiary Dailymotion over that of YouTube.
At the time, Orange CEO Stéphane Richard denied the allegations and questioned Cogent’s business practices, which he said were based on non-payment for networks that they used.
Vizio adds three sports channels including beIN Sport Xtra digitaltveurope.com/2021/01/25/viz… https://t.co/7On89q58zR
25 January 2021 @ 21:21:00 UTC
ICYMI: Japanese government brands Olympic cancellation claims ‘categorically untrue’ digitaltveurope.com/2021/01/25/jap… https://t.co/GcPfjzeOnc
25 January 2021 @ 21:00:00 UTC
ICYMI: UK watchdog outlines concerns about Virgin Media/O2 merger digitaltveurope.com/2021/01/25/uk-…
25 January 2021 @ 20:30:00 UTC
Report: Salto edges up to 200k subs after three months digitaltveurope.com/2021/01/25/rep… https://t.co/YtWFM5kAI8
25 January 2021 @ 20:00:01 UTC
Digital TV Europe has extended the deadline for completion of our annual industry survey until January 31 - take pa… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
25 January 2021 @ 19:30:00 UTC