Your freedom online is threatened by an EU proposal.
savetheinternet.eu
savetheinternet.eu
The issue is no longer only known to an obscure minority, and this in a country where the mood is very strongly against relinquishing any more autonomy to the EU.
In other words: if the EU attempts to nullify Dutch net neutrality (this proposal would override Dutch law), there will likely be a considerable backlash.
The EU explicitly revoking our online freedom could be the final nail in the coffin for Dutch support for the EU.
For everyone outside The Netherlands: Net neutrality was instated after the largest telecom provider wanted to count Whatsapp messages as SMS messages. This lead to public outcry.
Also, these EU organizations don't seem nearly as organized as the US ones (although the US ones aren't that great at this either). I found out about this the same day the EU Parliament had to vote on this like a month ago. Fortunately, they canceled the vote back then. Then I heard absolutely nothing about it until yesterday, again a day before the vote.
These organizations need to do a better job at keeping the public updated on these Internet issues. We need an EFF of Europe.
In the end, I gave up and read the comments on HN to try and work out what the issue was. And I'm someone who's very keen to keep updated on issues like these, so I can't imagine how many casual visitors they'll lose because of this.
Why is it the DEATH OF THE INTERNET AS WE KNOW IT when it's a new regulation that doesn't go as far as they want in the net neutrality direction? And all they want are some adjustments?
The idea of banning specialised services functionally identical to those on the Internet means banning all specialised services because you can provide arbitrary services over the Internet. Including TV and telephone which is what cable providers here usually sell in addition to Internet access.
Honestly, I don't really understand the issue at hand. Is there a concise, less agitating explanation somewhere?
That's exactly the point of the Internet: it offers arbitrary services. Banning stuff because it could compete with other services you offer is opening the door to the internet being crippled on all ISPs.
That's seriously terrifying.
Additionally, using the specialised service language, services like, say, Youtube, Facebook, Netflix or iTunes can pay ISPs to be treated as a a specialised service, offering a better-than-standard experience (lifted traffic limits, increased bandwidth). Such a treatment is sure to be pretty damn expensive, and raises a very tall hurdle that new entrants in those markets must jump if they want to compete with the incumbents on even ground. This is, once again, highly anti-competitive.
Personally, I'm not ideologically opposed to net neutrality legislation, but I'd rather identify why is competition not preventing ISPs from violating it, and what can be done to strengthen it. I'm getting somewhat tired of laws that are just trying to fix the problems created by other laws, like those which grant privileges to certain economic groups (not that I'm saying this is the case).
Avoid companies that threaten net neutrality.
Let's, as we do for other utilities (at least, in my country), make them lay it out on the table.
Open your books. What are the real revenues and expenses.
We've all (again, in my country) watched our bills rise and rise, while some of us at least read about consistent, continuing drops in the price of backhaul/trunk capacity, as just one example of what we perceive as a fairly apparent dichotomy.
The practice to this point, has been that the consumer pays for access to those trunks, and hosts pay for their access, and the companies involved live off of that. Now, they want to collect collect twice? They want to pick and choose and charge "premiums" to "prioritize"?
Where is the basis for any of this, in actual, cold, hard numbers? Until this is presented, I'm not even willing to have the conversation.
AND... for one, I don't believe it actually exists -- or need exist. It is varying shades of what I will qualify on the farther end as extortion. It is not of necessity, it is of convenience and greed on the part of those who increasingly seek to hold the reins ever more firmly and exclusively, now that "the Internet" is big business and not merely "some geeky corner".
Finally, as varying flavors of "expert" in this field and topic, we carry I think some societal obligation as well as personal and professional interest, in seeing that this doesn't happen.
Many of our own lives and careers have been substantially enriched and enhanced by the relatively open digital ecosphere we have experienced.
When the same old... "bullies", frankly, show up to try to dominate it for their own interest and gain. It's up to us to keep it out of their hands, and to ensure that the next generation of technology is yet more resistant to that "same old same old".
This is not about shirking responsibility -- and there are responsibilities involved, serious ones including legitimate needs and approaches to e.g. security.
It is about properly identifying it, amidst a clamour of often disingenuous self-interest. And identifying proper, effective, and practical approaches. About empowering, once again, the participants and community themselves. As I see it.
The committee voted against strict network neutrality, and for the possibility of differentiated "specialized services". The bill now goes to the European Parliament for vote.
Although I'm in her group of Young Advisors (we're 25), I didn't know about this until today.
I just sent an email to the other advisors and to some people of the European Commission to see what's up. They're always talking about how to improve net neutrality so I can't understand what's going on here.
Anyway I'm really angry about this shitty law killing net neutrality. This is kind of shocking.
If this law passes, I'll seriously ask myself if I want to continue in my role as an advisor.
http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/newsroom/cf/dae/docu...
Their 5 points:
1) We don't want a two-tiered Internet, all data should be treated equally. Article 19 of the European Commission’s Telecoms Single Market proposal must be deleted.
It's a tough article to read but as far as I can tell it says the opposite. That any ISP can operate in any part of the EU.
2) Private companies cannot be judge, jury and police over online content. Article 23.5.a. of the European Commission’s Telecoms Single Market proposal must to be deleted.
23.5.a. just says that one of the few exceptions that allow filtering is "implement a legislative provision or a court order, or prevent or impede serious crimes". That last "or" may be poorly interpreted I suppose and I don't know who gets to say what's a "serious crime". Other than that it seems reasonable.
3) Europe won the Nobel peace prize – The European Commission’s credibility on human rights issues shouldn't be jeopardized by engaging in the same type of internet censorship that Europeans critique elsewhere in the world.
This isn't a demand of any sort, just a political point.
4) The current definition of "specialized service" (Article 2.15) increases costs and risk to internet users, and must be changed or deleted.
I can't really see the problem with this. Once you've set rules that you can't filter/degrade service, letting your users hire specialized services on top doesn't seem out of order. I suppose the risk is that if there isn't enough competition "proper access to Netflix" may become a "specialized" service.
5) Article 23, “Freedom to provide and avail of open internet access,” must replace "shall be free" with "have the right" to protect internet users from online discrimination.
This on I don't get. Maybe in legal-speak this makes a difference. I only went through the rest of this very lightly but it seemed to go in the right direction.
The longer term goal should be to create meshnets, so we can give Internet to each other.
Direct censorship of stuff might not even be the biggest threat, though, but traffic shaping. We could avoid direct censorship if we build more P2P systems, which can't be "taken down". However, they probably could be throttled to a crawl, if the ISP is allowed to shape traffic and discriminate against the type of traffic they choose. Bitcoin for example can't be censored, but it can be made unusable.
Yes google buys internet transit, but not in Europa, they expect the users to pay for their free services when they are not north american, and they provide the "free VoIP" services this way.
Google, amazon are the problems, they don't assume the cost of their services and make it stand inequally amongst the users. Google is killing the cost model of ISP.
In this condition, how do you expect a sustainable free internet if you destroy the business model of ISP ?
Peering is just opened to anyone, and people prefer peering to buying. So people prefer to have the less possible amount of traffic leaving their AS.
http://www.peeringdb.com/view.php?asn=15169
They peer quite a lot even in Europa, it is a good move when you want to become an ISP.
Still they consider it is the ISP to support most of the cost of the dimensioning of the pipes. Without returned value.
Pfiou, good idea to double check.
They want to bypass the judicial system, so they can censor stuff en masse, like they do with Google/Youtube and their automated takedowns, but since it's at the ISP level, probably at a much larger scale and in a more comprehensive way.
If you don't have a facebook account, the you don't have internets ;-).