Cross-posted from C4C’s LinkedIn page – see the original article

The Coalition for Creativity (C4C) recently submitted its comments to the public consultation by the Irish Department of Culture, Communications and Sport (CCS) on the European Commission’s proposed EU Digital Networks Act (DNA). C4C members are both significant contributors to and heavy users of the digital ecosystem, and their capacity to create, disseminate, and reach European and global audiences depends on an open, competitive, and non-discriminatory internet.

C4C asks the Department to support four positions in Ireland’s engagement on the file:

1. Keep interconnection commercial and grounded in competition law. Remove from the recitals the framing that traffic handover creates “disproportionate or unsustainable investment needs” and that the benefits of increased traffic “should be shared,” which imports a sending-party-pays logic into the text.
2. Confine Articles 191 to 193 to genuine technical and efficiency cooperation. The “commercial arrangements” within reach of the Article 192 conciliation facility must be defined to exclude any payment for the delivery of traffic requested by end-users, and the Article 193(2) review clause, which leaves open the conversion of the facility into a mandatory mechanism, should be deleted.
3. Keep net neutrality in primary law. Delete or tightly bound the Article 93(6) power to detail the conditions for specialised services by adopting implementing acts, so that comitology can never lower the quality floor for the general internet or authorise commercial prioritisation.
4. Legislate on the evidence. The Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC) has repeatedly found the interconnection market to be competitive and its prices falling, and the European Parliamentary Research Service has found that the proposal’s own impact assessment neither properly addresses the question of cooperation between actors in the connectivity ecosystem nor discusses policy options on it. No market failure on the record justifies these interventions. The Regulatory Scrutiny Board issued a negative opinion on the draft impact assessment in October 2025 and cleared it only with reservations in December 2025.

Conclusion

For the sectors C4C represents, open and non-discriminatory access is the outcome that matters: creativity, research, and public-interest services reaching the public without paying a network operator for the privilege and without being relegated to a degraded default lane. The Digital Networks Act can deliver the simpler, more integrated single market it seeks without either outcome. That requires interconnection to stay commercial and competition-based, the cooperation and conciliation mechanism to stay technical and genuinely voluntary, and the boundaries of net neutrality to stay in primary law.

C4C urges the Department to base Ireland’s position on the independent evidence, above all BEREC’s findings that the interconnection market functions well and requires no charging intervention, and to weigh the interests of the whole digital ecosystem, including consumers, smaller providers, and the cultural, research, and creative sectors, against the narrower interest in new revenue for the largest network operators.

For detailed insights, see our full submission.