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European Union to Vote Tuesday On Flimsy Net Neutrality Rules

The European Union is prepared to vote on new net neutrality rules for member states that critics state may be worse than doing nothing at all. According to Stanford law professor Barbara van Schewick, the rules suffer from massive loopholes lobbied for by regional ISPs. Not only do the rules not cover zero rating (like the U.S. rules), they include ridiculously broad exemptions for "specialized services," and allow for "class discrimination" such as the throttling of services like BitTorrent.

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In short, these are net neutrality rules that actually protect net neutrality violators, a sign that incumbent ISPs have had way too much input into the crafting of them.

Critics note the EU rules even include bizarre provisions allowing for ISPs to violate neutrality to stop phantom, future congestion:

quote:
"...the proposal allows ISPs to use the same tools to prevent “impending” congestion. Since the meaning of “impending” is not clearly defined, this provision opens the floodgates for managing traffic at all times. It makes it easier for ISPs to discriminate among classes of applications even if there is no congestion, using the justification that congestion was just about to materialize."
van Schewick isn't the only one left unimpressed. Internet creator Tim Berners-Lee issued a statement also warning the EU to adopt much, much better protections:
quote:
If adopted as currently written, these rules will threaten innovation, free speech and privacy, and compromise Europe’s ability to lead in the digital economy.

To underpin continued economic growth and social progress, Europeans deserve the same strong net neutrality protections similar to those recently secured in the United States. As a European, and the inventor of the Web, I urge politicians to heed this call.
The rules seem awfully similar to the rules floated in the U.S. back in 2010, which allowed ISPs to engage in all manner of anti-competitive behavior -- just as long as they vaguely claimed it was for the safety and security of the network. And while the EU rules may be a small step forward for EU states that have no protections at all, they're a step backwards for countries like the Netherlands, Slovenia and Norway that already had tougher neutrality rules in place.

Most recommended from 3 comments



cb14
join:2013-02-04
Miami Beach, FL

5 recommendations

cb14

Member

Truly bad.

You can tell that Nellie Kroes is out- things are going backwards again in the EU.
The EU countries have the same problem with growing influence of big corporate and bribery/lobbying as the U.S.
For the U.S. this is bad as well. The wingnuts will start to scream " look, even the tree hugging commie nanny Europeans do not have net neutrality, we should not have it either." and pressure on FCC will increase.