Denis O'Brien says the telecoms industry is no longer viable without regulatory changes.

Founder of Digicel, Irish man, Denis O'Brien.

In a recent interview with Telecoms.com, founder of Digicel, Denis O'Brien, did not hold back in expressing his displeasure with the European telecom operators and private tech giants Meta and Google. In the candid interview, O'Brien called the European regulators "b****xed and also declared that overall the telecoms industry is now "sh*te". Mr. O'Brien also labeled private tech giants Google and Meta as greedy f#cks, saying that they were depriving third world countries of well-needed revenue.

No Longer Viable 

Mr O’Brien declared that the telecoms industry was no longer viable without some structural and regulatory change that would force companies such as Meta and Google to share revenue with local telecoms operators.

"The telecoms business is b****xed," he said. "It's a moribund industry, sadly, in terms of growth and margin, cash flow, regulation and OTTs [Over The Top services from Google, Meta, TikTok and others]. There’s a lot of sh**e in the bucket at the moment."

He also said that certain decisions taken by European regulators, as well as the European Commission directions, were "shocking".

"Four operators in every country is mental," he said, of regulators preferences for multiple operators in each marketplace to provide competition.

"In reality, if you have two mobile operations knocking the sh*t out of each other, that's better than four, under-capexing the market," he said.

Mr O‘Brien revealed that big tech firms were profiteering not just from telecoms networks, but from poorer countries.

Big Tech's unfair advantage

"The whole of Africa is being defrauded in my mind," he said. "Facebook's revenues come out of Africa directly from advertisers but the corporation tax goes straight out of there to Ireland. This is the second wave of colonialism."

Nigeria and a number of other African countries recently introduced legislation to levy value-added tax on digital services from businesses such as Google and Meta.

Asked about who is to blame for the industry’s current malaise, Mr O’Brien attributed most of the blame to operators themselves.

"It’s 75 percent the operators and 25 percent the regulators," he said. "Everybody's been asleep at the wheel. All the CEOs of all the big telcos have been asleep."

He therefore opined that CEOs' bonuses should be conditional on if they are able to make progress on getting revenue-share from big tech online platforms such as Meta which, he notes, cover over 70 percent of most network traffic.

He also asserted that the telecoms CEOs lacked vision in seeing the shift of influence these tech giants would have on the industry, and failed to capitalize from the inception of their services.

"They [telecom CEOs] couldn't see the changes as they were happening, and they never tried to influence what would happen. Google, you know, offered the two big US carriers a revenue share and they were told to f*** off by the carriers, which was a massive mistake. And that f***ed up the industry for years," he said.