EU net neutrality deal miraculously keeps everyone happy

Thanks to a 10-hour meeting, it appears that EU negotiators have done the unexpected: created net neutrality rules that keep both digital rights activists and telco operators happy. Last Tuesday, after three months of toing and froing between member states and the European Parliament, a last-ditch political deal was pushed …

[Wolfclaw]

EU Fails Again

So lets go through the points for the ISP's.

1. Banned from blocking or throttling internet speeds for certain services for commercial reasons - We'll find a loop hole.

2. They cannot prioritise content, yet enforcement is open to interpretation. - How much abuse can we get away with.

3. Some electronic communication services other than internet access services, require specific QOS - so we'll just throttle you and say the NHS needed the bandwidth.

4. Internet traffic can be managed to deal with “temporary or exceptional congestion” - we''ll abuse them when we can.

5. Temporary congestion beyond ISP control - I bet this will be a favourite excuse, especially when it happens a lot and they don't want to increase capacity when economically justified.

6. Zero-rated service are left to each countries ISP to abuse.

Looking forward to having my first run in with Virgin Media support muppets !

[heyrick]

Re: EU Fails Again

The point here is not so much what the rules are and how they may be worked around, but rather enforcement.

If flouting the rules may cost several days of profit then they might be followed. If it is a hundred euro "fine" then this might as well be written in invisible ink.

[IHateWearingATie]

Bring on the downvotes

Seems like a sensible set of proposals to me. I'm not that bothered about Net Neutrality for the UK as most (to be fair, not all) people have a wide choice of ISPs and if one starts playing silly buggers others will soon start differentiating to attract customer.

Take a look at the 'unlimited' debacle - it may have taken a bit of time, but there are mainstream ISPs offering properly unlimited access (for a price) if that's what you after. If you're not that bothered as you don't download a lot of data, there are others that will offer a cheaper deal. Virgin have gone a different way, with dynamic throttling rather than monthly download limits (I'm with Virgin - the dynamic throttling works very well for what I use it for). It wasn't fast, but it worked - I can see no reason why the same wouldn't happen without net neutrality laws if some ISPs started killing iPlayer bandwidth unless you / BBC paid them more money.

I can see in countries where certain suppliers have a virtual monopoly in an area this would matter much more - I understand this is a particular issue in the USA. But I don't live there, so they can do whatever they think is best.