Netflix, Google, Meta… These monsters that are swallowing up the French Web!

We already knew that more than 50% of the world’s bandwidth was monopolized by these 8 monsters, but the music is much the same in France since we now know that 54.3% of the Net is used by only 5 companies.

Arcep published its Annual Report on French web resources and it is more or less the same players who are gorging themselves with the giant Netflix in the lead. The streaming platform alone “eats” 19.7% of the total bandwidth. Next come Google with 10.5% (YouTube, it consumes!), Akamai and its cloud and cache servers for 8.9%, Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, etc.) with 8.2% and finally Amazon with 7%. Note that in GAFAM, Apple and Microsoft are small players with 1.3% and 1% respectively.

Booming streaming and VoD

These are of course the figures for last year, but we note the increase in overall Internet traffic in France with an increase of 21.5% between 2021 and 2022. It must be said that the rise of streaming and 4K plays a big part in the equation. We always come back to the same thing when it comes to doing the accounts: do heavy consumers have to go to the cash register to participate in the maintenance and expansion costs of the network at the risk of net neutrality or should we leave Orange, Bouygues, Free and SFR to fend for themselves with the risk of a potential price increase?