Telecom vs. Google, Facebook, and Web Giants

Speaking at the Asstel convention on “Telecommunications for Italy”, Franco Bernabè of Telecom Italia was clear: the current business model of the telecom industry is threatened by web giants.
Google, Facebook, eBay, Skype: all large, very large companies, traversed daily and nightly by millions of users who utilize their services, “burning” bandwidth. The network is practically worn out (and perhaps usurped?) by these companies which, however, do not contribute to the maintenance of the network infrastructure itself. Franco Bernabè doesn’t stop at this observation but adds another: these are non-Italian companies which therefore “divert funds also from the state treasury as they are abroad and with tax profiles that are yet to be verified“.
It wasn’t a general speech without references but included barbs accompanied by “names and surnames”, as can be seen by reading the statements of the Telecom CEO: “What is happening is that, after having correctly eliminated the monopoly on transport and access infrastructure, there is a risk of creating conditions for dominant positions, established outside the TLC supply chain, to gradually extend into the network operator segment. We are talking about the dominant positions of providers of digital solutions, services, and applications, often located overseas, such as Apple with iTunes and the App Store, Google with online advertising and eBay, Skype with its unmanaged VoIP, Facebook with social networking”.
It cannot be denied that the use of YouTube, connections via iPhone, iPad (or smartphones in general), and continuous visits to Facebook have a decisive impact on bandwidth consumption; if we also consider the slice of telephone traffic “eaten” by Skype to the detriment of traditional telephone operators, the landscape only sketched by Bernabè is quite evident.