[lutoma]

I don't know about this specific case but Deutsche Telekom has a history of highly shady behavior when it comes to peering (or lack thereof). Things like intentionally running ports at public exchanges below capacity so they're always congested and then attempting to bully content providers into paying outrageous sums for peering (even though that traffic is already paid for by their customers, so really they're just trying to double dip. Peering is usually a mutually beneficial affair with no exchange of money).

For a very long time, there were substantial issues with getting traffic from Hetzner to Deutsche Telekom for similar reasons. At the time, when you rented a server at Hetzner you could actually pay extra to get 'premium' routing to Deutsche Telekom though Core Backbone (AS33891), which did make the ransom payments (unlike Hetzner itself).

They were also hard at work undermining net neutrality for a while by zero-rating some companies on their mobile network until they were stopped by courts.

I'm not sure what's going on in this specific case, but I'm not inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt.