
EU Net neutrality: Industry MEPs want stricter rules against blocking services - tigerente
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-%2f%2fEP%2f%2fTEXT%2bIM-PRESS%2b20140318IPR39210%2b0%2bDOC%2bXML%2bV0%2f%2fEN&language=EN
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hopeless
For reference, here's the official press release:
[http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-%2f%2f...](http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-%2f%2fEP%2f%2fTEXT%2bIM-
PRESS%2b20140318IPR39210%2b0%2bDOC%2bXML%2bV0%2f%2fEN&language=EN)

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.

~~~
Qantourisc
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.

~~~
Retric
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.

~~~
Qantourisc
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.

~~~
Retric
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.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> 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.

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zacinbusiness
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.

~~~
rayiner
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.

------
bowlofpetunias
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.

------
luisivan
Does anybody know where
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7421424](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7421424)
([http://savetheinternet.eu](http://savetheinternet.eu)) is?

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?

------
rjzzleep
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.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7169968](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7169968)

[2]
[http://aei.pitt.edu/31864/1/No_242_Rasmussen_on_EP_Lobbying_...](http://aei.pitt.edu/31864/1/No_242_Rasmussen_on_EP_Lobbying_final.pdf)

------
themichael
Here is the full Proposal:
[https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/7682/RegulationoftheEuro...](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/7682/RegulationoftheEuropeanParliamentandoftheCouncillayingdownmeasuresconcerningtheEuropeansinglemarketforelectroniccommunicationsandtoachieveaConnectedContinent.pdf)

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Qantourisc
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.

~~~
mhitza
Theoretically it should be visible on votewatch.eu however I'm having a hard
time finding it.

~~~
Qantourisc
Thank you, no votes for 18/03/2014 according to the site, not updated then
yet. (Or no data I suppose)

------
clienthunter
We moan a lot louder than we cheer.

This is a win. We should celebrate.

~~~
Qantourisc
True, but it's a bit like the idiomatic "Throw out the baby with the bath
water", but in this case we are keeping both the baby and the water.

------
mercurial
Damn. I sent an email this morning asking a couple of MEPs to vote against it.
So it goes.

~~~
Ihmahr
Maybe your email didn't arrive yet, because...

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tudorizer
Leave it to EU to send us back to the dark ages...

~~~
efdee
It was shot down for not actually protecting Net Neutrality and giving
companies way too much wiggle room. Reading is hard, let's go shopping.

