The DNA’s “Voluntary” Counseling: How to Ruin a Happy Marriage…and the Internet
Picture a happy marriage. It might not be flawless, but it is functional. You have found your rhythm where chores are divided, bills are paid, and toast is toasted without drama. You do not invoice your partner for walking past your side of the bed, nor do you escalate hallway traffic into litigation. You simply coexist pragmatically and peacefully.
Now imagine the state steps in.
They are not there to fix anything, mind you. They just want to offer a little “help.” They say they noticed things are going smoothly, so they are introducing a “Voluntary Conciliation Procedure.” The premise is simple: if one partner ever feels unfairly compensated for being in the house, they can summon a state-sanctioned mediator to request payment.
Suddenly, Sunday morning coffee becomes a hostage situation.
Your spouse narrows their eyes at your cup and says, “I had to walk past the kitchen to get to the garden. That constitutes wear and tear on my knees. I am filing for conciliation unless you pay a transit fee.”
Technically, it remains a “voluntary” option. You could refuse. But now there is a mediator at the table and the threat of escalation hovers over every chat about groceries or Netflix passwords. Congratulations: your marriage just became a bureaucracy.
Welcome to Articles 191 to 193 of the Digital Networks Act (DNA). Here, the European Commission proposes a new “cooperation mechanism” with no apparent sense of irony. It turns the open internet into a passive-aggressive household governed by thinly veiled threats. Talk about creating a toxic environment!
The “Voluntary” Trap
The language appears disarmingly dull. Article 191 tasks the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC) with publishing “guidelines” to foster cooperation on technical and commercial issues. Article 192 then establishes a “voluntary conciliation facility,” which is essentially a telco hotline to summon content providers to negotiate new payment arrangements.
We can hardly call this cooperation. It looks more like the state handing out pamphlets titled Monetise Your Spouse: A Guide to Domestic Rent-Seeking.
For years, large telecoms have lobbied to extract fees from content providers (the very same providers whose services their customers are actively paying to access). Regulators, users, and experts have roundly rejected this concept as a network tax, a Net Neutrality violation, and a bad idea wrapped in bad packaging. But now it returns wearing a “conciliation” hat while smiling politely.
Make no mistake: this aims to manufacture disputes instead of resolving them. It suspends a regulatory Sword of Damocles over content providers, where the threat of a dispute is just as damaging as the dispute itself. Because remember: this has so far been a comfortably settled marriage with only sufficient friction to indicate both partners are still alive and interested in each other, not a The War of the Roses type battlefield (not the English civil wars: the novel and movie aptly dubbed a comedy about contempt by one of the IMDb reviewers).
The Smoking Gun
Recital 164 offers the smoking gun. It declares that normal internet traffic exchange, specifically peering and transit, may impose “disproportionate or unsustainable investment needs” on receiving networks.
This serves as telco code for a simple sentiment: we have discovered that doing our job is inconvenient, and we would like someone else to pay for it again. If telcos are struggling with peak traffic loads of under 10 Mbps per subscriber in 2026 while still advertising “gigabit speeds,” perhaps the problem lies with truth in advertising instead of traffic management.
Error 404: Forecasting as a Threat Vector
Just when you think the situation cannot get more baroque, Recital 404 arrives. It asks regulators to establish guidelines for the “exchange of information on expected traffic patterns, including peaks.”
Translation: content providers must now forecast their future demand. If they guess wrong, it provides another excuse to initiate conciliation.
Back in our domestic analogy, this mirrors your spouse demanding a weekly bathroom schedule and a predictive model for biscuit crumbs just so they can “optimise household efficiency.” If you miss the mark, you return to marriage counselling or even court. This imposes a burden of clairvoyance on digital services that no telco ever met themselves.
Not Just a “Big Tech” Problem
The telco lobby loves to frame this as a battle against “Big Tech,” but the DNA discriminates against no one. It applies to any provider of an electronic communications network or service. This includes national research and education networks, banks running secure payment gateways, public broadcasters delivering news, and health systems exchanging medical records. It even impacts small ISPs and regional CDNs.
Under the DNA’s logic, a telco could argue that a university uploading large climate datasets for research purposes is imposing an “unsustainable burden” and demand payment or initiate conciliation. This extends beyond a war on Silicon Valley to become a siege on the entire digital commons.
A Dispute Creation Threat, Not a Resolution Tool
You do not improve a healthy marriage by installing a divorce lawyer in the kitchen.
The DNA’s “voluntary conciliation” model invites misuse due to its vague thresholds and open-ended procedural rules. It incentivises brinkmanship and normalises manufactured grievances as negotiation tactics. This creates a chilling effect on smaller players who might find compliance cheaper than resistance. We are looking at regulated hostage-taking instead of a functioning market.
The Fix Is Obvious: Cut the Cord
Articles 191 to 193 and the accompanying problematic Recital “clarifications” of the DNA must go.
Removing them prevents the DNA from undermining its own goals. Europe needs faster, fairer, and more interoperable networks. It does not need procedural arsenals for incumbents to slow-roll innovation. The open internet thrives on cooperative infrastructure and mutual interest. Mandated appeasement destroys that balance.
If your marriage is thriving, you do not install a crisis hotline. And if Europe’s internet economy is finding its stride, you do not let telcos trip it on purpose only to charge a fee to help it back up.
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Written byCaroline De Cock, LL.M., Head of Research
