

Dutch parliament passes Europe's first net neutrality law - wicknicks
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/06/dutch-parliament-passes-europes-first-net-neutrality-law.ars

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pan69
So let me get this straight. There is a "private" company owning most (if not
all) of the Internet infrastructure in this country and to boost their profits
they have conceived a scheme where they are going to discriminate bits that
are send through their infrastructure by "deep scanning" and determining what
bits are send through to bill accordingly?

Wouldn't it be easier (and cheaper) for them to just increase costs of their
infrastructure across the board? Call me paranoid but I suspect that there is
something else going on here, these guys are determined on their "deep scans".

And what about SSL?

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JCB_K
What you're saying is not exactly right. They own most of the Wired internet
infrastructure, but when it comes to Mobile there are 4 networks with their
own infrastructure. This deep scanning was only meant for mobile internet,
AFAIK. If 1 company would increase prices on data (or certain kinds of data),
they'd lose customers. If they'd do it together, they'd get huge fines for
forming a cartel.

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BasDirks
Initially there were plans to extend the deep packet scanning to over-the-wire
communications.

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hesselink
Note that there is an exception if the ISP does it on ideal grounds, tells the
user and doesn't use it for its own profit. This was an amendment by a
extremist christian party that accidentally got voted in by the labor party...

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tomp
Hm... the way I read it, the user has to tell the ISP. It's opt-in.

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hesselink
You are right. I was misled by an incorrect new article, but the actual
amendment [1] is clear that the user has to ask the ISP to do this.

[1]
[https://zoek.officielebekendmakingen.nl/dossier/32549/kst-32...](https://zoek.officielebekendmakingen.nl/dossier/32549/kst-32549-33?resultIndex=2&sorttype=1&sortorder=4)

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beck5
I would love to see something along these lines come from the EU, I don't
trust the UK government on this.

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rickmb
This does effectively block the EU from going in the complete opposite
direction (as in: explicitly granting ISP's the right to discriminate
internet-traffic). It would mean invalidating Dutch net-neutrality law, which
is politically virtually unthinkable.

This may not be a guarantee of future net-neutrality in the EU, but it is not
insignificant. It for instance means that a backdoor approach like Googles
deal-with-the-devil "net-neutrality" proposal
([http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/08/google-verizon-
netneutr...](http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/08/google-verizon-
netneutrality)) is something that is now very unlikely to happen on an EU-wide
level.

