European Parliament passes net neutrality law

Here&#x27;s a kind of sickening statement:<p>&#x27;&quot;Europe&#x27;s telecoms operators are facing decreasing revenues ... compared with operators in the U.S. and Asia,&quot; said the GSM Association, an industry group for mobile phone companies. In a statement signed by director Anne Bouverot, the group said European laws are &quot;impairing their ability to invest in the infrastructure required to put Europe back on the path to growth and jobs.&quot;&#x27;<p><a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/european-parliament-adopts-net-neutrality-law-23172382" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;abcnews.go.com&#x2F;Technology&#x2F;wireStory&#x2F;european-parliame...</a><p>One example of these &quot;poor companies&quot;:<p>TeliaSonera: 1.69 billion euros in profit out of a 2.99 billion euro revenue (2013)<p>Edit: Sorry, yearly revenue was about 11.6 billion euro.

&gt; mobile carrier industry body the GSMA said it “recognises the efforts of Rapporteur Pilar del Castillo to develop a constructive response to the Commission’s Connected Continent proposals but believes that the overall package fails to address the key challenge of stimulating growth and investment.”<p>I&#x27;ll take that as a ringing endorsement and a strong sign that the net neutrality law is good for consumers. Good job on writing these amendments and getting them to pass, left-wing MEPs!

I think the EU is getting an amazing amount of work done, if you consider that it consists of 28 nation states which went to war with each other regularly for centuries up to a couple of decades ago...

These are great news, I am a big supporter for net neutrality, however I am a bit concerned about one small detail:<p>&gt;“Net neutrality” means the principle according to which all internet traffic is treated equally, without discrimination, restriction or interference, independently of its sender, recipient, type, content, device, service or application.<p>I wonder how this will work in case of malicious attacks, ddos, disruptive requests and packets&#x2F;connections with the sole purpose of disrupting the normal usage of the net. Blocking these at isp level is not a bad idea, but how deep does this rabbit hole go?

It was a close call... Neelie Kroes didn&#x27;t want this. But against expectations, democracy won.. That doesn&#x27;t happen much in the world (Eg. What Karel De Gucht tried &#x2F; did ).<p>All with all, i&#x27;m very glad this happened! It gave me some faith again in Europe as a regulator (i&#x27;m from Belgium ).<p>(still dissappointed in Neelie Kroes though, she has some very good ideas... Opposing net neutrality was definetly a bad idea)

I wouldn&#x27;t give too much on this just yet. From the information in the article I can&#x27;t tell if the word &quot;strong&quot; is correct for what was passed today.<p>If anything, an indicator that Neelie Kroes is happy with the result might point to a weak law that won&#x27;t help net neutrality at all. We might not have the &quot;Specialised services&quot; part in there anymore. Yet, let&#x27;s wait until the dust settles and some people have read the complete text before we celebrate.<p>Also, as we speak, the text that didn&#x27;t make it might already have been inserted in the US-EU trade agreement that is discussed behind closed doors at the moment. Wouldn&#x27;t be the first time that the same words were dismissed first and than added in a different law. ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) was dismissed and then added to a treaty between the EU and Canada.

Well then, finally a point to prove to anti-EU activists (UK: UKIP, DE: AfD, etc.) why having the European Union actually <i>is</i> important and the European Parliament isn&#x27;t just a paper tiger regulating the population to death.<p>(Granted, most European laws ARE regulation to death, but this is a good starting point...)

I&#x27;m so happy how Andersdotter&#x2F;@teirdes has arrived in Brussels. She is already &quot;e-communications&quot; spokesperson for the Greens&#x2F;EFA group in the EP: <a href="http://www.greens-efa.eu/electronic-communications-12163.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.greens-efa.eu&#x2F;electronic-communications-12163.htm...</a> and I believe that they have a very powerful collaboration on privacy and other pirate issues

Roaming charges will effectively be dropped on the 15th December 2015. Src: <a href="http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/news-room/content/20140331IPR41232/html/Ensure-open-access-for-internet-service-suppliers-and-ban-roaming-fees-say-MEPs" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.europarl.europa.eu&#x2F;news&#x2F;en&#x2F;news-room&#x2F;content&#x2F;2014...</a>

I think this can also be taken as good news in the US. Passing these laws makes Europe a very attractive place to put an internet service.<p>It may be wishful thinking, but my hope is that this form of international competition motivates US legislators to pass similar net-neutrality laws to keep from losing start-ups and tech companies to Europe.

Roaming charges: I predict the telecomms will be increasing their general charges to make good losses on roaming.<p>&quot;Infrastructure and spectrum are expensive, and these costs need to be recouped somehow. Right now, the mobile operators are a bit stuck into low domestic data prices. So the money has to be clawed back from roaming customers instead&quot;.<p>The reversal of this policy will mean that the non-traveling public will subsidize travelers. Great for those voting and attending the EU Parliament among others. Not so hot for the rest.

A couple of popular acts emanating from the EU parliament just recently.<p>Couldn&#x27;t be anything to do with the European parliament elections coming up this summer could it?<p>Our local MEP was on radio claiming credit for the smartphone recharger harmonization measure just recently. When queried about loopholes in the act that effectively allow manufacturers to sidestep the issue she revealed herself to be clueless.

&gt; Providers of internet access to end-users shall not discriminate between functionally equivalent services and applications.<p>This means they can still throttle torrents, right?

I wonder if we could interpret this to mean that it would be illegal for ISPs not to provide IPv6. It is just internet traffic after all.

Why do I get the feeling that most of these comments are basically pointing out faults in EU instead of the news itself which is of great relevancy to all of us.<p>I understand the audience here is mostly American but shouldn&#x27;t we really by cheering this achievement and try to convince US senators to follow the lead?<p>US is the one who is behind right now. Neutrally speaking.

If we didn&#x27;t already have such a shoddy history with national telecoms (and other infrastructure company), I would be in favor of them.<p>It&#x27;s so unsatisfying to think that this ugly government in bed with big oligopolies, regulators, lobbying and nonsense could be the optimal solution. yuck.

It never stops to amaze me - what does have Europe that other places don&#x27;t?<p>...anyway, I&#x27;m just glad and thankful to be born in Europe!

Are European laws a bellwether for US laws? I hope so.

They&#x27;re still allowed to have premium channels for their TV service and such. Isn&#x27;t that not very &quot;net neutrality&quot;-like?

From first reading, this makes it look as if ISPs will be unable to offer eg elevated weighting to specific VoIP traffic unless that&#x27;s offered by the ISP themselves. I want my VoIP trunks to my exchange to have better QoS than my Skype chats.<p>I&#x27;m not convinced this is a good thing.