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.
As usual I think the politicians fail to see/understand again how this can epically backfire: Example: Google pays your ISP to be faster then the competition. Now the ISP has a free "specialized service", and competition goes down.
I agree that it's less than ideal but an ISP can always get priority access to there internal network because it's closer to there customers. As long as they need to slow down the entire internet rather than slowing down service X then a customer will complain to the ISP that the internet is slow vs thinking service X is slow.
It prevents optimizing things like speed test.net which is vary common.
Not when you only have a few high-bandwith providers for some content. One will be the faster then the normal-speed rest. But the consumer will see this as service X is slow, and the fastest one is best.
If you have a low latency 20mibt connection to the internet then ALL video is fast. Below that you might have a point. However, this says an ISP can only change bandwidth and latency so if you allow one high bandwidth activity say downloading MMO's then must allow all high bandwidth activity. If you have low latency for gaming then you also have low latency for websites etc.
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.
> If you have a low latency 20mibt connection to the internet then ALL video is fast.
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.
Comments on a previous discussion[0] noted that the bill's qualification of "specialised service" wouldn't allow for that:
> (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;
A plenary session of the parlament will vote on this April 3rd. The day after the parlament will stop all activities because of the upcomings European elections.
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.
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/
> ALDE spoke pro net neutrality but voted against.
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.
I wonder what the motivation for voting this way is as you see it here in the US as well. Are the legislators all simply driven by money that's thrown at them by lobbyists? Or do they simply interpret the concept of the Internet differently? I try to be an optimist and to assume that most lawmakers actually work from the idea that they are making the world better, even if I disagree with their positioning. But this seems so basic that it's difficult to understand how elite-educated people can act this way except through greed.
To politicians, particularly in the U.S., the internet is just another piece of of commercial infrastructure. Its for shopping on Amazon and the like. Very few people in politics have high minded ideals about the internet connecting people and disseminating knowledge and overcoming borders and whatnot. Partly because most politicians aren't of that generation, but also because idealists don't get very far in politics. To the extent they have ideals, its usually all about protecting private property,[1] not openness or fairness or such ideas many would consider hippie bullshit.
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.
Don't believe the propaganda: this is still the proposal with holes big enough to enough to put priority traffic the size of an airliner through.
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?
funny i was about to write, i'd be willing to bet that they manage to get this through one way or another.
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.
If anyone can find me a list of who votes for or against, this can help me during next vote to vote for people with a brain.
Also this is NO place to vote for such a thing. The EU was invented to pass laws that could only work when applied to the entire EU. I don't see how this law has to be EU wide to work.
The long term intention is to create a common inner market for the entire EU. I don't see how unified laws could be avoidable if such a beast is to be created.
Disagree with the law as implemented if you wish, but it is obviously created at the correct level of government.
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.