European Parliament fails to provide a strong regulation to protect net neutrality, leaving it for BEREC to fix it

Update august 30th, 2016

The new guidelines of the Body of European Regulators of Electronic Communications (BEREC) confirm a strong protection for the neutrality of the network, and for the open and free Internet, in the EU.

More info: https://savetheinternet.eu/

…previously

The European Parliament has approved today the Telecom Single Market Regulation, which lays out how net neutrality should be protected in Europe.

The text voted today has some uncertain points and inconsistencies that undermine net neutrality due to pressures coming from the Telcom Companies.

These uncertainties leave room for the Telcoms to develop new business models based on discrimination and scarcity, to the detriment of users’ online freedoms and the Internet’s innovative potential.

The drafting process of the telecommunications single market regulation is up today. It will not be amended or rewritten any more.

The political parties claim, stating that they’ve decided to protect Net Neutrality today, is false:

– Internet was born neutral and has been neutral (at least legally) to the date. The regulation adopted today opens the doors to Internet providing companies so that they can “legally” carry out practices that go against the Net Neutrality. It is a regulation that does not even define what Net Neutrality is.

– What has been decided by not adopting the amendments, is to accept an uncertain legislation and leave it to the regulators in different countries and the BEREC http://berec.europa.eu/ to decide, when applying the regulation, to what extent will they allow ISPs to violate or not Net Neutrality.

It is worth stressing that the regulators will make these decisions based on fair competition and not based on citizen rights. That was the work of the European Parliament; the only European Union body whose members are directly elected.

– Co-regulation of roaming charges together with Net Neutrality in this same text has been a manipulation and has involved blackmail, from the very beginning, to divert attention.

– According to the European Consumer Association, the agreement reached on the roaming charges is very unambitious:
http://www.beuc.eu/publications/beuc-pr-2015-012_telecom_single_market.pdf
 

We are concerned citizens from NGOs around Europe that care about civil liberties in the digital realm.

Initiative für Netzfreiheit (AT)
European Digital Rights (EU)
Access Now (international)
Digitale Gesellschaft (DE)
La Quadrature du Net (FR)
Bits of Freedom (NL)
Reporters Without Borders (international)
Open Rights Group (UK)
IT-Politisk Forening (DK)
Xnet (ES)
InfoHouse (SL)
Startups for Net Neutrality (international)