The Complaint That Crystallised a Debate
On 12 May 2025, a coalition of digital-rights and consumer organisations — epicenter.works, the Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte (GFF), and Germany's federal consumer federation Verbraucherzentrale Bundesverband (vzbv), together with Stanford Law Professor Barbara van Schewick — filed a formal complaint with Germany's telecom regulator, the Bundesnetzagentur. Their target: Deutsche Telekom's practice of deliberately engineering congestion at network peering points and then charging online services for priority access to Telekom customers.
The mechanics are direct. Deutsche Telekom, which controls roughly 40% of Germany's broadband market, allegedly allows interconnection points to become bottlenecks — and then offers paid bypass lanes to services willing to pay. Services that decline face peak-hour degradation. Hundreds of documented complaints from Telekom customers show slowdowns between 6 PM and 11 PM affecting Cloudflare-routed services — Discord, DeepL, OpenAI, GitHub — as well as public broadcasters ARD and ZDF. Users report download speeds collapsing from expected rates to as low as 30 KB/s or 0.8 Mbit/s. Switching to a VPN, or switching ISP entirely, restores normal performance — a pattern pointing to deliberate routing decisions rather than capacity constraints.
The Legal Framework and What It Says
Germany enforces net neutrality under Regulation (EU) 2015/2120, the EU's open internet access law. The regulation requires ISPs to treat all traffic equally, irrespective of content, application, service, sender, or recipient. Paid prioritisation — precisely what Deutsche Telekom is accused of offering — is prohibited. The Bundesnetzagentur has applied this framework before: in April 2022, it banned Deutsche Telekom's StreamOn zero-rating add-on and Vodafone's Vodafone Pass product, following a European Court of Justice ruling that differential traffic treatment violated equal-treatment principles. Maximum penalties were raised to €1 million for serious breaches under the Telecommunications Legislation Modernisation Act, effective December 2021.
BERECs December 2024 assessment of IP-interconnection practices lent further weight to the coalition's case, identifying bottleneck exploitation as a potential violation of EU net neutrality rules. Swiss regulator ComCom reached the same conclusion in December 2024, rejecting a similar "double-dipping" model in Switzerland.
Steelmanning the Telcos
The counterargument merits fair consideration. Deutsche Telekom and its peers have invested billions in fibre rollout and 5G infrastructure. The "fair-share" argument holds that content-heavy platforms — streaming giants, cloud providers — consume a disproportionate share of network resources while paying nothing directly to the access network that delivers their traffic. If Alphabet or Amazon generate most of the demand justifying infrastructure investment, the argument goes, it is not unreasonable for operators to seek cost recovery from those who benefit. The European Commission has taken this view seriously enough to embed elements of it in its new legislative proposal.
Why the Model Still Fails the Innovation Test
The problem is that the fair-share logic collapses at the structural level. Consumers already pay ISPs for internet access. Content providers already pay their own transit and interconnection costs. The Telekom model adds a third payment layer — a toll on the ability to reach a specific ISP's customers at contracted speeds. This is not cost recovery for infrastructure; it is rent extraction from a captive access market.
The consequences fall hardest on the internet's most productive actors. A startup in Frankfurt competing with an incumbent platform cannot match the latter's negotiating leverage or capacity to pay access premiums. Public-interest services — the ARD media library that documented degradation, or a university file server reporting 30 KB/s instead of expected broadband rates — have no commercial rationale to pay telco access fees. If the Bundesnetzagentur declines to act, Germany risks entrenching a structural cost disadvantage for any service that lacks deep pockets.
Critically, the coalition's complaint notes that Deutsche Telekom is reportedly the only German ISP employing this model. Other providers expand interconnection capacity when bottlenecks form, absorbing the cost as a standard network obligation. That asymmetry is itself evidence that the congestion is manufactured rather than organic — a deliberate commercial strategy, not a capacity planning failure.
The EU Digital Networks Act Complicates the Picture
Germany's enforcement case arrives as the legal framework underpinning it faces direct challenge. On 21 January 2026, the European Commission published a proposal for the Digital Networks Act (DNA), which would repeal Articles 3, 4, 5, and 9 of the 2025 Open Internet Regulation — the provisions covering equal traffic treatment, transparency requirements, and national regulatory authority. More significantly, the DNA removes 18 of the 19 interpretive recitals from the OIR that have guided courts and regulators in applying net neutrality rules for nearly a decade. Without those recitals, enforcement outcomes become unpredictable.
The DNA also restructures BEREC, granting the Commission access to internal deliberations — raising concerns that technical net neutrality enforcement could be subordinated to political bargaining in Brussels. What is framed as administrative modernisation could, in practice, replace independent regulatory judgement with Commission veto power over what constitutes a net neutrality violation.
What Comes Next
Germany's Bundesnetzagentur has a credible enforcement record. It moved decisively on zero-rating in 2022 when ECJ precedent provided the opening. The Telekom interconnection complaint presents a harder evidentiary case, but the BEREC December 2024 findings provide solid regulatory grounding.
The broader risk is not that Germany fails this specific enforcement test, but that the EU legislative track erodes the very rules the regulator is being asked to apply. If the Digital Networks Act passes in its current form, a Bundesnetzagentur ruling in 2026 — however well-grounded — could prove Pyrrhic: a strong enforcement precedent under a framework quietly being dismantled at the supranational level.
For policymakers and civil society across Europe, Germany's experience offers a practical case study in why net neutrality is not an abstraction. It is the condition that allows a Berlin startup or a public broadcaster to reach consumers on the same terms as a well-capitalised content giant. That condition is worth defending — both at the national enforcement level and in the ongoing legislative fight in Brussels.