A quiet handover with high stakes
Since 1 July 2026, Ireland has held the rotating presidency of the Council of the EU, and among the files it now chairs is the Digital Networks Act (DNA) — what telecoms lawyers call Ireland's "flagship telecoms file" (McDermott Will & Emery). The DNA is the largest rewrite of EU electronic-communications law since the 2018 European Electronic Communications Code, and it folds the bloc's net neutrality rules into a broader connectivity package at exactly the moment telecom operators are lobbying hardest to reopen a decade-old settlement.
What the DNA actually touches
The European Commission published its DNA proposal on 21 January 2026. Rather than leave the 2015 Open Internet Regulation — the law that codified net neutrality across the EU — standing on its own, the Commission folds it in: the DNA is "replacing the European Electronic Communications Code (EECC), the BEREC Regulation, the Radio Spectrum Policy Programme and the core parts of the Open Internet Regulation" with one consolidated instrument (European Commission). The headline user-facing rights — no blocking, no throttling, no paid prioritization of specific apps — remain in the text. What changes is the scaffolding around them. Digital rights group EDRi, citing analysis from its Austrian member epicenter.works, counts 18 of the Open Internet Regulation's 19 explanatory recitals as deleted — the interpretive guidance regulators and courts have leaned on for a decade to resolve ambiguous cases — which EDRi argues "reduces legal clarity and weakens citizens' rights" (EDRi).
The network-fees fight hasn't gone away
The more consequential dispute is about money. European telecom operators have argued for years that streaming and video platforms should help fund the last-mile networks their traffic runs over — the so-called "fair share" or network-fee proposal. The Commission dropped a mandatory version of this after broad opposition. But the DNA revives it in softer form: Euronews reports Articles 191 through 193 set up a process where BEREC drafts guidelines, national regulators hold consultations, and if operators and platforms still can't agree, the law falls back on undefined "options for effective cooperation" — language the outlet's analysis calls a backdoor that could produce de facto fees without ever putting mandatory ones to a vote (Euronews).
Industry is split, not aligned
This isn't simply telecoms versus tech. Connect Europe, the operators' trade body, wants Ireland to go further and "modernise open internet rules" to reflect "technological evolution," framing the DNA as a competitiveness reset rather than a technical patch (Connect Europe). CCIA Europe, representing large tech platforms, has published recommendations urging Ireland to reject "heavy-handed mechanisms under the Digital Networks Act that could allow telecom operators to demand network fees," insisting any telecoms-specific obligations stay "tightly targeted at traditional last-mile operators" and explicitly exclude CDNs and private networks (CCIA Europe). Notably, CCIA doesn't think the Commission's compromise even helps its own side: Tech Policy Press reports the group called the voluntary mechanism "a step backwards" that adds regulatory complexity while settling nothing (Tech Policy Press). Both camps, in effect, agree the current draft is worse than a clean yes or no.
Steelmanning the telcos' case
Operators have a real argument. Europe has consistently underinvested in fibre and next-generation mobile relative to the US and parts of Asia, and video-heavy traffic from a handful of large platforms does disproportionately load the networks operators alone finance. A narrowly scoped interconnection dispute-resolution mechanism — one that keeps BEREC and national regulators in the loop, as Articles 191-192 do, rather than letting operators set terms unilaterally — is not obviously the "two-speed internet" critics describe. If Ireland's Presidency can hold the mechanism to that narrow, regulator-supervised shape, it would be a defensible middle path.
Why proportionality still counsels caution
The problem is the direction of drift, not any single article. The Commission itself abandoned mandatory fees after finding the case for them too thin to survive stakeholder scrutiny — which makes reintroducing the same outcome through a vaguer "cooperation" clause hard to defend on the merits rather than on lobbying stamina. And stripping 18 of 19 recitals is not a simplification exercise if it leaves BEREC and national regulators — the Office for Digital Networks, in the DNA's new architecture — improvising enforcement standards case by case, which is precisely the unpredictability operators claim to want less of. Ireland does not need to choose between the Commission's proposal and either lobby's wishlist. The Council file, still with the Parliament's ITRE committee and its rapporteur Michał Kobosko, and last updated after a Council presidency progress report in early June 2026, remains open for amendment. The strongest outcome for the open internet — and for investment certainty — is a DNA that keeps the fee-dispute mechanism genuinely regulator-led and restores enough interpretive text that neither telcos nor platforms can plausibly claim the rules mean whatever they need them to mean this quarter.