An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: On Monday, Intel introduced FakeCatcher, which it says is the first real-time detector of deepfakes -- that is, synthetic media in which a person in an existing image or video is replaced with someone else's likeness. Intel claims the product has a 96% accuracy rate and works by analyzing the subtle "blood flow" in video pixels to return results in milliseconds. Ilke Demir, senior staff research scientist in Intel Labs, designed FakeCatcher in collaboration with Umur Ciftci from the State University of New York at Binghamton. The product uses Intel hardware and software, runs on a server and interfaces through a web-based platform.

Unlike most deep learning-based deepfake detectors, which look at raw data to pinpoint inauthenticity, FakeCatcher is focused on clues within actual videos. It is based on photoplethysmography, or PPG, a method for measuring the amount of light that is absorbed or reflected by blood vessels in living tissue. When the heart pumps blood, it goes to the veins, which change color. With FakeCatcher, PPG signals are collected from 32 locations on the face, she explained, and then PPG maps are created from the temporal and spectral components. "We take those maps and train a convolutional neural network on top of the PPG maps to classify them as fake and real," Demir said. "Then, thanks to Intel technologies like [the] Deep Learning Boost framework for inference and Advanced Vector Extensions 512, we can run it in real time and up to 72 concurrent detection streams."

"FakeCatcher is a part of a bigger research team at Intel called Trusted Media, which is working on manipulated content detection -- deepfakes -- responsible generation and media provenance," she said. "In the shorter term, detection is actually the solution to deepfakes -- and we are developing many different detectors based on different authenticity clues, like gaze detection." The next step after that will be source detection, or finding the GAN model that is behind each deepfake, she said: "The golden point of what we envision is having an ensemble of all of these AI models, so we can provide an algorithmic consensus about what is fake and what is real." Rowan Curran, AI/ML analyst at Forrester Research, told VentureBeat by email that "we are in for a long evolutionary arms race" around the ability to determine whether a piece of text, audio or video is human-generated or not.

"While we're still in the very early stages of this, Intel's deepfake detector could be a significant step forward if it is as accurate as claimed, and specifically if that accuracy does not depend on the human in the video having any specific characteristics (e.g. skin tone, lighting conditions, amount of skin that can be see in the video)," he said.

The Linux Foundation Europe (LF Europe) -- the recently launched European offshoot of the open source Linux Foundation -- today announced the launch of Project Sylva, which aims to create an open source telco cloud framework for European telcos and vendors. TechCrunch: This is the first project hosted by LF Europe and is a good example of what the organization is trying to achieve. The project aims to create a production-grade open source telco cloud stack and a common framework and reference implementation to "reduce fragmentation of the cloud infrastructure layer for telecommunication and edge services." Currently, five carriers (Telefonica, Telecom Italia, Orange, Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom) and two vendors (Ericsson and Nokia) are working on the project.

"There's a whole bunch of Linux Foundation networking projects already that have taken telecommunications into the open source era," Arpit Joshipura, the general manager for Networking, Edge and IoT at the Linux Foundation, told me. "All those projects are under what is called the [LF] Networking foundation. [â¦] So whatever that work is that is done by the telcos, Sylva is going to leverage and build on top of it with these European vendors to solve EU specific requirements. Those are security, energy, federated computing, edge and data trust." At the core of Sylva is a framework for a compute platform that can be agnostic to whether a workload is running on the telco access network, edge or in the core. The project aims to build a reference implementation, leveraging all of the work already being done by LF Networking, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (the home of Kubernetes and other cloud-native infrastructure projects), LF Energy and others.

Global banking giants are starting a 12-week digital dollar pilot with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the participants announced on Tuesday. From a report: Citigroup, HSBC, Mastercard and Wells Fargo are among the financial companies participating in the experiment alongside the New York Fed's innovation center, they said in a statement. The project, which is called the regulated liability network, will be conducted in a test environment and use simulated data, the New York Fed said. The pilot will test how banks using digital dollar tokens in a common database can help speed up payments.

Microsoft has done a lot to make their flagship tablet-laptop more repairable. Following iFixit's recent teardown, the Surface Pro 9 was the "most repairable we've seen from the product line yet." Ars Technica shares the major findings: iFixit has consulted with Microsoft's hardware teams for a while now, providing advice on making devices more repairable. As evidence of this, Microsoft claims in a statement that it will:

- Make repair guides available for the Surface Pro 9's components by the end of the year
- Work with "a major US retailer" to build out an authorized (in-store) repair network by early 2023
- Offer parts to individuals and repair shops by the first half of 2023

All these factors improve repairability, both in practice and in iFixit's (and French, European, and potentially other nations') repair scores.

iFixit's editorial teardowns, however, are conducted independently. When the team dug in, they found that the glass display has some flex built into it now, making it harder to shatter when you pry on the (now softer) glue underneath. With the screen off, you have access to all the modular components: motherboard, thermal module, the Surface Connect Port, speakers, Wi-Fi module, front and rear cameras, and side buttons. Most notably, the battery is now screwed down instead of held in place with glue. That makes the most common and predictable repair to the device "just plain simple," iFixit claims. The RAM is soldered to the motherboard, something that iFixit would typically penalize in the past. But iFixit says that given the power savings and performance boost from proximity to the CPU, it can't punish the decision. "Adding it all up, iFixit gives the Surface Pro 9 a 7 out of 10," concludes Ars' report. "That's a notable leap from prior Surface models, like the Pro 7, which received a 1 out of 10. But the Surface Pro 9's score will likely move up a notch or two if Microsoft keeps its promises to release manuals and spare parts to anyone who wants them next year."

MachineShedFred writes: Tesla has opened their charging connector and equipment standards as the "North American Charging Standard" (NACS), including links to technical specifications and connector data sheets and CAD files. The formerly proprietary connector, now called NACS, is the most common charging standard in North America: "NACS vehicles outnumber CCS two-to-one, and Tesla's Supercharging network has 60% more NACS posts than all the CCS-equipped networks combined." Tesla noted that charging network operators "already have plans in motion to incorporate NACS at their chargers."

Italy's police said on Friday they had dismantled the country's largest network for online TV piracy, one that accounted for 70% of illegal streaming across the nation. From a report: The network had more than 900,000 users and yielded "millions of euros" in monthly profits, a police statement said. As part of the operation, premises were searched and material seized in more than 20 cities up and down the country, including Rome, Naples and Catania, the statement added. The raids were ordered by prosecutors in Catania, Sicily, who were due to give more details in a press conference later on Friday.

Amazon Chief Executive Andy Jassy is leading a cost-cutting review of the tech giant and paring back on businesses at the company that haven't been profitable,
Wall Street Journal reported Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: The Seattle-based company, whose stock is down about 45% year to date, has been experiencing a slowdown in its core retail business as it tries to manage costs from its logistics network. Other technology companies have been making cuts to better navigate a potential recessionary environment. This week, Facebook parent Meta Platforms said it would cut more than 11,000 workers, or 13% of staff.

As part of the monthslong cost-cutting review, Amazon has told employees in certain unprofitable divisions to look for jobs elsewhere in the company, because the teams they were working on were being suspended or closed, some of the people said. Efforts to scrutinize expenses across a sprawling array of businesses have become common at the world's largest technology companies. Alphabet's Google has slowed the pace of hiring and scaled back support for a startup incubator, and Chief Executive Sundar Pichai has voiced concerns this year about employee productivity.

LinkedIn emerged victorious in a nearly six-year-old lawsuit against hiQ Labs for data scraping. From a report: The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ruled in favor of the professional network, with Judge Edward Chen writing, "hiQ relied on LinkedIn for its data primarily by scraping wholly public LinkedIn profiles using automated software. hiQ had continuously attempted to circumvent LinkedIn's general technical defenses since May 2014.

"It experimented and attempted to reverse engineer LinkedIn's systems and to avoid detection by simulating human site-access behaviors. hiQ also hired independent contractors known as 'turkers' to conduct quality assurance while 'logged-in' to LinkedIn by viewing and confirming hiQ customers' employees' identities manually." hiQ Labs wound down its operations in 2018, although its servers continued running into 2019 to deliver on client contracts.

Chen wrote, "In sum, hiQ breached LinkedIn's user agreement both through its own scraping of LinkedIn's site and using scraped data, and through turkers' creation of false identities on LinkedIn's platform."

"Internet provider Starlink is reviving the old concept of soft data caps with the introduction of a 'Fair Use policy,'" writes Slashdot reader thegarbz. "Users who consume more than 1TB of data per month will find their connections deteriorated." The Verge reports: Residential customers will now start each monthly billing cycle with an allocation of "Priority Access" data that tracks what you're using from 7AM in the morning until 11PM at night. If you surpass that 1TB cap, which Starlink says less than 10 percent of users currently do, you'll be moved to "Basic Access" data, or deprioritized data during heavy network congestion, for the rest of your billing cycle. If you want to buy more Priority Access data, you can, at the cost of 25 cents per GB, and any data used between 11PM and 7AM doesn't count towards your Priority Access tally. "This announcement comes off the back of a recent article by ArsTechnica, showing that Starlink's median download speed has dropped to 62Mbps in Q2 of 2022 as the network struggles under the load of increased subscriber numbers," adds thegarbz.

By Tuesday morning Mastodon had gained 123,562 new users since October 27 (the site told TechCrunch) and had 528,607 active users. But by Saturday the number of new users had nearly doubled, to 230,000, reports CNN — with 655,000 active users.

In fact, for every 363 active users on Twitter, there's now one on Mastodon, CNN's figures suggest (since Twitter has nearly "238 million daily active monetizable users"). Exploring the recent spike, they note that Mastodon "has a similar look to Twitter, with a timeline of short updates sorted chronologically rather than algorithmically. It lets users join a slew of different servers run by various groups and individuals, rather than one central platform controlled by a single company like Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook." Unlike larger social networks, Mastodon is both free to use and free of ads. It's operated by a nonprofit run by Mastodon creator Eugen Rochko, and is supported via crowdfunding... "It is not as large as Twitter, obviously, but it is the biggest that this network has ever been," said Rochko, who originally created Mastodon as more of a project than a consumer product (and, yes, its name was inspired by the heavy metal band Mastodon)....

A lot of Mastodon's features and layout (particularly in its iOS app) will look and feel familiar to current Twitter users, though with some slightly different verbiage; you can follow others, create short posts (there's a 500 character limit, and you can upload images and videos), favorite or repost other users' posts, and so on.... There are some key differences, particularly in how the network is set up. Because Mastodon users' accounts are hosted on a slew of different servers, the costs of hosting users is spread among many different people and groups. But that also means users are spread out all over the place, and people you know can be hard to find.
CNN also notes the problem with signing up for a Mastodon server: "some of which are open to anyone, some of which require an invitation (you can also run your own server). There is a server operated by the nonprofit behind Mastodon, Mastodon.social, but it's not accepting more users."

An anonymous reader shared this report from long-time tech pundit Robert X. Cringley. "A Distributed Autonomous Organization (DAO) called OrangeDAO is cooperating with a small seed venture fund called Press Start Capital to establish the OrangeDAO X Press Start Cap Fellowship Program for new Web3 entrepreneurs.

"Successful applicants get $25,000 each plus 10 weeks of structured mentorship plus continued access to the more than 1200-member OrangeDAO network. In exchange, OrangeDAO and Press Start get to invest in the resulting companies, if any, produced by the class." Cringley likens it to the American tech startup accelerator Y Combinator — but on steroids.

Cringley also explains why he thinks this "middle class VC" model "will replicate and grow unconstrained," ultimately exporting itself from Silicon Valley to cities around the world. There are many DAOs around and hardly anybody understands them or knows what they are good for. Mainly they have seemed to be involved in the NFT market. But OrangeDAO is different. It has 1200+ members and every one of those members is a graduate of the Y Combinator startup accelerator. They are verified Y Combinator company founders, so they've all had similar entrepreneurial experiences and see business much the same way as a result. OrangeDAO seems to have big plans and to make those plans happen in August the DAO, itself, raised $80 million in venture capital, with their first use of that capital being these Fellowships.

I think this will change forever venture capital and the world economy.

It represents a new stage in the evolution of venture capital. In many senses it is the democratization of VC....

The DAO members all have similar backgrounds, similar values, and similar risk tolerances. THERE ARE MORE OF THEM, so they can do bigger deals. And — here's the important bit — THEY ARE ALL Y COMBINATOR-EDUCATED and connected globally through the blockchain. They not only know many of the same things, they have a sense of where this knowledge comes from and why it is useful.... In the YC-based DAO we have people who want the next generation of entrepreneurs to be even better-educated. It's not some egalitarian goal, either: they see it as key to success for the whole thing.

Smart people with good ideas will self-identify, be funded at a subsistence level to allow them to develop those ideas and prove their worth, then they can participate on a truly level playing field for the first time.... Gone is the Tycoon, gone is the professional VC who doesn't understand his tech, gone soon will be the angels (subsumed into the DAO model), and gone for the most part are the asshole VCs whom entrepreneurs grow to hate (not all of them, but a lot).

Done correctly, this model is essentially Meritocratic VC. If the idea is good, the market is ready, and the people know what they are doing, the capital will be there.

The Indian government wants to develop a home-grown industry that can design and assemble drones and make the components that go into their manufacture. The BBC reports: "Drones can be significant creators of employment and economic growth due to their versatility, and ease of use, especially in India's remote areas," says Amber Dubey, former joint secretary at the Ministry of Civil Aviation. "Given its traditional strengths in innovation, information technology, frugal engineering and its huge domestic demand, India has the potential of becoming a global drone hub by 2030," he tells the BBC. Over the next three years Mr Dubey sees as much as 50 billion rupees $630 million invested in the sector.

[...] However, despite the excitement and investment around India's drone industry, even those in the sector advise caution. "India has set a goal of being a hub of drones by 2030, but I think we should be cautious because we at present don't not have an ecosystem and technology initiatives in place," says Rajiv Kumar Narang, from the Drone Federation of India. He says the industry needs a robust regulator that can oversee safety and help develop an air traffic control system for drones. That will be particularly important as the aircraft become larger, says Mr Narang. "Initiatives have to come from the government. A single entity or a nodal ministry has to take this forward if we want to reach a goal of being the hub by 2030," he says.

India also lacks the network of firms needed to make all the components that go into making a drone. At the moment many parts, including batteries, motors and flight controllers are imported. But the government is confident an incentive scheme will help boost domestic firms. "The components industry will take two to three years to build, since it traditionally works on low margin and high volumes," says Mr Dubey. Despite those reservations, firms are confident there will be demand for drones and people to fly them. Chirag Shara is the chief executive of Drone Destination, which has trained more than 800 pilots and instructors since the rules on drone use were first relaxed in August 2021. He estimates that India will need up to 500,000 certified pilots over the next five years.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, HBO has "switched off Westworld" after its recent fourth season. From the report: It's an unexpected fate for a series that was once considered one of HBO's biggest tentpoles -- an acclaimed mystery-box drama that racked up 54 Emmy award nominations (including a supporting actress win for Thandiwe Newton). Last month, co-creator Jonathan Nolan said in an interview that he hoped HBO would give the series a fifth season to wrap up the show's ambitious story, which has chronicled a robot uprising that changed the fate of humanity. "We always planned for a fifth and final season," Nolan said. "We are still in conversations with the network. We very much hope to make them." Co-creator Lisa Joy likewise said the series has always been working toward a specific ending: "Jonah and I have always had an ending in mind that we hope to reach. We have not quite reached it yet."

Yet linear ratings for the pricey series fell off sharply for its third season, and then dropped even further for season four. Westworld's critic average on Rotten Tomatoes likewise declined from the mid-80s for its first two seasons to the mid-70s for the latter two. Fans increasingly griped that the show became confusing and tangled in its mythology and lacked characters to root for. Looming over all of this is the fact Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav has pledged aggressive cost cutting mandate, though network insiders maintain that saving money was not a factor in the show's cancelation. HBO said in a statement: "Over the past four seasons, Lisa and Jonah have taken viewers on a mind-bending odyssey, raising the bar at every step. We are tremendously grateful to them, along with their immensely talented cast, producers and crew, and all of our partners at Kilter Films, Bad Robot and Warner Bros. Television. It's been a thrill to join them on this journey."

The New York Police Department has joined Ring Neighbors, the neighborhood surveillance network built around Amazon's Ring security cameras. The Verge reports: The partnership, announced yesterday, means the NYPD will view people's posts on Neighbors and be able to post directly to it, including requests for public help on "active police matters." Neighbors is a Nextdoor-like extension of Ring's security camera business, allowing residents of a neighborhood to discuss crime and safety as well as post footage from their cameras. While many law enforcement departments have joined Neighbors in recent years, this marks its adoption by America's largest police force. (Police could separately request Ring footage for criminal investigations without the app.) It's part of an increasingly tight integration between Amazon and police -- one that's raised both concerns about privacy and questions about its crime-solving value.

"More than 70,000 users joined Mastodon on the day after Musk's Twitter takeover announcement," writes Slashdot reader votsalo. "Mastodon is a six-year-old decentralized social media platform that uses 'federated' servers." The Guardian's Wilfred Chan writes: I joined Mastodon this week, and it took a few hours just to master its new vocabulary. Some of it is a little silly-sounding: instead of tweets, you have "toots". Things get trickier after that. Mastodon is not a single website but a network of thousands of websites called "instances", also called servers. These servers are "federated", which means they are run by different entities but can still communicate with each other without needing to go through a central system. And the space they all exist in is called the "fediverse," which some savvy tooters call "the Fedi."

When you sign up for Mastodon, the first thing you do is choose a server. There are general-purpose ones, such as mastodon.social, as well as ones aimed at interest groups, such as kpop.social or linuxrocks.online. There are also joke servers like dolphin.town, where the only thing users are allowed to post is the letter "e". The server becomes part of your username (for example, wilfred@kpop.social), and the toots you see on your feed are toots from your server-mates, rather than from the entire fediverse. But you're also free to toot at people from other servers and even "boost" their public toots on to your feed.

That's how Mastodon creates a unified global experience without being controlled by one entity, said Eugen Rochko, Mastodon's Germany-based founder and lead developer. "The servers are service providers, like Hotmail and Gmail are for email. It doesn't mean that the different servers are isolated from each other, like old school forums," he said. "Having just one account allows you to follow and interact with anyone in this global decentralized social network." But Mastodon's model comes with its own risks. If the server you join disappears, you could lose everything, just like if your email provider shut down. A Mastodon server admin also has ultimate control over everything you do: if for some reason the owner of kpop.social doesn't like that I boosted a toot from dolphin.town, they could remove it or even "defederate" the server, which would block all dolphin toots from the k-pop server completely. A server admin could also snoop on my private toots if they wanted to -- or delete my account for any reason. While Mastadon's 70,000 jump in users sounds impressive, it's "still a drop in a bucket compared with Twitter's reported 450 million daily active users," says Chan. The decentralized software also remains difficult for many people to use.

According to TechCrunch, Mastadon says it has "gained 123,562 new users as of October 27, 2022 and now has 528,607 active users on the network as of October 31, 2022."

States are shoring up expertise in high-speed internet networks by creating or expanding broadband offices to prepare for an influx of infrastructure cash. Ensuring that more than $40 billion in new funding connects every American to high-speed internet service is a job that's falling to the states -- and they need help. From a report: Of all the job openings posted for states' burgeoning broadband offices, the "director" position is the most common vacancy, according to data The Pew Charitable Trusts shared with Axios. Directors are often responsible for crafting state broadband plans and overseeing hundreds of millions in funding from multiple state and federal programs. The Pew tracker found 15 director-level positions posted, out of about 68 total positions since September 2021. Washington, Colorado, and Maine had the most job postings. The Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment Program (BEAD), funded by the bipartisan infrastructure law, will provide $42.45 billion to expand high-speed internet access by funding planning, infrastructure deployment and adoption programs in all 50 states, D.C., Puerto Rico and U.S. territories.

Last week, Meta announced an AI-powered audio compression method called "EnCodec" that can reportedly compress audio 10 times smaller than the MP3 format at 64kbps with no loss in quality. Meta says this technique could dramatically improve the sound quality of speech on low-bandwidth connections, such as phone calls in areas with spotty service. The technique also works for music. Ars Technica reports: Meta debuted the technology on October 25 in a paper titled "High Fidelity Neural Audio Compression," authored by Meta AI researchers Alexandre Defossez, Jade Copet, Gabriel Synnaeve, and Yossi Adi. Meta also summarized the research on its blog devoted to EnCodec.

Meta describes its method as a three-part system trained to compress audio to a desired target size. First, the encoder transforms uncompressed data into a lower frame rate "latent space" representation. The "quantizer" then compresses the representation to the target size while keeping track of the most important information that will later be used to rebuild the original signal. (This compressed signal is what gets sent through a network or saved to disk.) Finally, the decoder turns the compressed data back into audio in real time using a neural network on a single CPU.

Meta's use of discriminators proves key to creating a method for compressing the audio as much as possible without losing key elements of a signal that make it distinctive and recognizable: "The key to lossy compression is to identify changes that will not be perceivable by humans, as perfect reconstruction is impossible at low bit rates. To do so, we use discriminators to improve the perceptual quality of the generated samples. This creates a cat-and-mouse game where the discriminator's job is to differentiate between real samples and reconstructed samples. The compression model attempts to generate samples to fool the discriminators by pushing the reconstructed samples to be more perceptually similar to the original samples."

US financial institutions spent nearly $1.2 billion on likely ransomware-related payments last year, most commonly in response to breaches originating with Russian criminal groups, according to the Treasury Department. From a report: The payments more than doubled from 2020, underscoring the pernicious damage that ransomware continues to wreak on the private sector. The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, said its analysis "indicates that ransomware continues to pose a significant threat to U.S. critical infrastructure sectors, businesses and the public." Financial institutions filed 1,489 incidents related to ransomware in 2021, up from 487 the year before, according to data collected under the Bank Secrecy Act. FinCEN's analysis included extortion amounts, attempted transactions and payments that were unpaid. FinCEN said the top five highest-grossing ransomware variants from the second half of 2021 are connected to Russian cybercriminals. The damage from Russian-related ransomware during that period totaled more than $219 million, according to the data.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Android Authority: It's been five years since the advent of the eSIM card on smartphones, and yet the computer in our pockets is still tied down to a plastic tab that hasn't changed all that much since its debut in 1991. What gives? [...] An eSIM-enabled phone can store multiple SIM cards on the device. It makes switching networks as simple as switching your Wi-Fi network, and that's anything but convenient for mobile operators. For users in areas with spotty connectivity or rural networks, easier switching to alternative operators means loss of business for major players like Verizon or AT&T. In markets like India, dual-wielding SIM cards for better data, voice, or preferential rates are exceptionally common. Taking away the friction involved in changing physical SIM cards carries the risk of losing a customer, and it's no secret that operators have been dragging their feet to avoid that.

Theoretically, setting up an eSIM on any network should be as straightforward as pointing your camera at a QR code and activating a line. In practice, that's rarely true. Verizon's support page suggests that Android users need to call up a support desk to activate an eSIM. iPhone users have it slightly easier and can directly add the line to the phone through Verizon's website. Meanwhile, Vodafone requires you to install an app. Finally, the likes of Airtel India ask you to play a game of the fastest finger first by requiring an SMS response within 60 seconds to proceed with adding an eSIM to your line. None of these are as simple as just popping out a tray and plopping in your SIM card.

Meanwhile, as internet-based calling, texting, and video messaging become the norm, carriers are left with increasingly few add-ons to increase revenues. Tack on sky-high spectrum prices for resources like 5G and eSIMs become even less enticing to carriers. Tangential features like premium-priced international roaming plans are yet another profit driver that eSIMs circumvent. When done right, getting started with an international eSIM can be a simple two to three-click process to get you onboarded and ongoing. My colleague Rita and I have had a fantastic experience with travel eSIM services like Airalo. When I tried out Airalo earlier this year, the process took just a few taps indicating that there was no real reason for eSIMs to be complicated. However, for most operators, that just isn't the case. While hard to quantify, this needless friction has certainly hampered consumer perception of eSIMs.

"Faced with a squeeze on profits and dwindling share prices, internet service providers are seeking ways of making additional income," reports CNBC.

One example? "Telecom groups are pushing European regulators to consider implementing a framework where the companies that send traffic along their networks are charged a fee to help fund mammoth upgrades to their infrastructure, something known as the 'sender pays' principle." Their logic is that certain platforms, like Amazon Prime and Netflix, chew through gargantuan amounts of data and should therefore foot part of the bill for adding new capacity to cope with the increased strain. "The simple argument is that telcos want to be duly compensated for providing this access and growth in traffic," media and telecoms analyst Paolo Pescatore, from PP Foresight, told CNBC.

The idea is garnering political support, with France, Italy and Spain among the countries coming out in favor. The European Commission is preparing a consultation examining the issue, which is expected to launch early next year.... Meta, Alphabet, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Netflix accounted for more than 56% of all global data traffic in 2021, according to a May report that was commissioned by European Telecommunications Network Operators' Association. An annual contribution to network costs of 20 billion euros ($19.50 billion) from tech giants could boost EU economic output by 72 billion euros, the report added.... U.S. tech giants should "make a fair contribution to the sizable costs they currently impose on European networks," the bosses of 16 telecom operators said in a joint statement last month....

The debate isn't limited to Europe, either. In South Korea, companies have similarly lobbied politicians to force "over-the-top" players like YouTube and Netflix to pay for network access.... Meanwhile, tech giants say they're already investing a ton into internet infrastructure in Europe — 183 billion euros between 2011 to 2021, according to a report from consulting firm Analysys Mason — including submarine cables, content delivery networks and data centers. Netflix offers telcos thousands of cache servers, which store internet content locally to speed up access to data and reduce strain on bandwidth, for free.