EU Net neutrality: Industry MEPs want stricter rules against blocking services
europarl.europa.eu
europarl.europa.eu
yes, the headline is "Net neutrality: Industry MEPs want stricter rules against blocking rival services" which contradicts the translated headline above.
I think it all revolves around these two lines:
>> MEPs inserted strict rules to prevent telecoms companies from degrading or blocking internet connections to their competitors’ services and applications
and
>> Companies would still able to offer specialized services of higher quality, such as video on demand and business-critical data-intensive cloud applications, provided that this does not interfere with the internet speeds promised to other customers
On balance, it doesn't seem like net 'neutrality' will be as badly eroded as in the U.S.
It prevents optimizing things like speed test.net which is vary common.
Sure, an ISP may simply chose not to offer high bandwidth to the internet but that's a much harder sell to there customers. And long term laws can change if companies start abusing them.
Just because they sell you a 20Mbit connection doesn't mean you'll always get 20Mbit out of it. Suppose that during peak hours you only get 4Mbit because the ISP's uplink is saturated. Obviously customers would complain...unless the ISP offers extremely low prices to Google, Dropbox, Netflix, etc. to get them all on the pay to play plan and bypass the bottleneck. If the sites 90% of the customers use 90% of the time are fast, the customers will blame the remaining sites for being slow, which forces the sites to pay the ISP. Meanwhile the ISP can raise prices on existing "customers" like Netflix one at a time until they're all paying monopoly rents to the ISP.
> (15) "specialised service" means an electronic communications service or any other service that provides the capability to access specific content, applications or services, or a combination thereof, and whose technical characteristics are controlled from end-to-end or provides the capability to send or receive data to or from a determined number of parties or endpoints; and that is not marketed or widely used as a substitute for internet access service;
YOU can urge them to make a difference, YOU can ask them to protect net neutrality. Contact them, call them, mail them, fax them, ask them to represent you, to stand for you for your interests and your freedom, and not for telcos.
Save the internet: http://savetheinternet.eu/
If you want context: until now S&D and Greens proved to be pro net neutrality, EPP against and ALDE spoke pro net neutrality but voted against.
Another press release about the vote: http://www.laquadrature.net/en/net-neutrality-dangerous-loop...
Finally take a stand, raise your voice and ask your candidates and future representatives to defend your digital rights by signing this manifesto and asking your politician to do the same: http://www.wepromise.eu/
To be fair, the initial proposal from the Commission was atrocious, and ALDE have played a good role in a massive redrafting which has made it a pretty okay piece of legislation. They only voted against the last amendments (from Catherine Trautmann). It's worth campaigning for those amendments to be adopted, but you need to adopt the right tone when talking to ALDE members.
It would be great for the tech industry if it was all about lobbying, because the tech industry has more money than the telecom companies. Facebook could buy the full lobbying capacity of the top 10 DC lobbying firms for about half a century for how much they spent on WhatsApp. That's not the bottleneck.
[1] The particular challenge in the U.S. is that at least nominally, almost all the telecom investment is private money. There are subsidies, but the cable companies top the charts for capital expenditures. There is a strong disdain for the idea of telling companies what to do with the infrastructure they built. This is less of a problem in Europe, where much more of the infrastructure was built with government money.
It basically says providers can still run the mafia style protection racket as long as they don't completely block traffic. The difference between slowing down traffic from A or prioritizing traffic from B is of course mostly academic: the result is the same. The extra bandwidth for the priority traffic doesn't magically appear out of thin air, and the fact that providers are allowed to charge for it (i.e., it's not about optimizing traffic for technical reasons) means it kills net neutrality stone dead.
Also, it would override the law in EU countries that have actual net neutrality.
So it serves three purposes: make it harder to adopt net neutrality in the EU in the future, make it impossible for individual EU member states to adopt net neutrality independently (would be against EU rules), and kill net neutrality in countries that already have it (ditto).
The whole idea behind this proposal is not some kind of compromise (which would be bad enough), it's to kill net neutrality in the EU now and forever.
The scariest part is that the European parliament, which is usually harder to manipulate than the backroom dealings of committees and national politicians (see ACTA), appears to have a majority in favor of this faux neutrality. Apparently they're looking forward to one last big "fuck you" before the next elections.
It was on the front page (#2) like an hour ago and it just disappeared. I have searched in the first 5 pages and it isn't there, I guess it was removed from the front page for some reason?
i would like to quote myself at this point on another issue:
"you have to applaud the germans for their efforts though. after all they were able to temporarily halt the data retention efforts. i say temporary, because ..." [1]
for every member of the eu parliament representing your country there's four lobbyists[2]. but ultimately it was clear that this would pass in one form or another. sometimes because of money, sometimes because targeted disinformation.
the same has been going on in other areas such as eurobonds, or the european stabilization efforts, where now the eu can request funds from the bundesbank, and doesn't even have to justify it anymore.
the concept is always following the same pattern:
1. outrage the public with some weird request. argue that it's a necessary evil for the stability and freedom in the euro zone
2. pass the same request in a slightly lightened form. try to keep the request out of the publics eye as long as possible. as an older example ACTA was leaked, and required consorted efforts, but the effort to bring this one down, was way too late and way too little
3. adjust the passed law over time to be closer to the original request.
4. distract public with outrage over slaughtered giraffe.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7169968
[2] http://aei.pitt.edu/31864/1/No_242_Rasmussen_on_EP_Lobbying_...
https://www.laquadrature.net/en/net-neutrality-dangerous-loo...
Disagree with the law as implemented if you wish, but it is obviously created at the correct level of government.
This is a win. We should celebrate.