7 ms·

Your freedom online is threatened by an EU proposal.

225 points by themichael 13y ago

bowlofpetunias 13y ago
Net neutrality has become law in the Netherlands after a public outcry about the traffic discrimination plans of the major mobile providers. The issue is no longer only known to an obscure minority, and this in a country where the mood is very strongly against relinquishing any more autonomy to the EU. In other words: if the EU attempts to nullify Dutch net neutrality (this proposal would override Dutch law), there will likely be a considerable backlash. The EU explicitly revoking our online freedom could be the final nail in the coffin for Dutch support for the EU.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- PeterSmit 13y ago
  Bullshit. The Netherlands is never ever stepping out of the EU (of which it was a founder btw), it would be economic suicide. For everyone outside The Netherlands: Net neutrality was instated after the largest telecom provider wanted to count Whatsapp messages as SMS messages. This lead to public outcry.
bad_user 13y ago
This sounds terrible. On the other hand I'd like to know what's the status quo right now in Europe. For example, are ISPs required to not block or restrict access to online services?
- nyrina 13y ago
  I know the Danish courts has ordered Danish ISPs to block The Pirate Bay, so I doubt the status quo is that ISPs are required not to block online services.
  - higherpurpose 13y ago
    Yes, but according to this, ISPs may decide themselves to block stuff, without any court orders. This is something MPAA has been pushing for a long time with ACTA, TPP, and apparently with this, too. They want to bypass the judicial system, so they can censor stuff en masse, like they do with Google/Youtube and their automated takedowns, but since it's at the ISP level, probably at a much larger scale and in a more comprehensive way.
  - atmosx 13y ago
    If this passes by and enters to action, you'll notice the difference (HN not loading, or loading extremely fast while your FB connection will go as fast as ever). If you don't have a facebook account, the you don't have internets ;-).
- Ihmahr 13y ago
  Here in the Netherlands we already have net neutrality, which Europe might be taking away now.
coldcode 13y ago
Our freedom online is threatened by every government, even those not our own.
tigerente 13y ago
The vote by the Parliamentary Committee on Industry, Research and Energy already took place today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7421545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7421545. The committee voted against strict network neutrality, and for the possibility of differentiated "specialized services". The bill now goes to the European Parliament for vote.
spindritf 13y ago
Is it about net neutrality ("all packets were created equal") or is it about censorship (by which I mean government actions like court orders to block sites and filters)? Or is it somehow about both? Why is it the DEATH OF THE INTERNET AS WE KNOW IT when it's a new regulation that doesn't go as far as they want in the net neutrality direction? And all they want are some adjustments? The idea of banning specialised services functionally identical to those on the Internet means banning all specialised services because you can provide arbitrary services over the Internet. Including TV and telephone which is what cable providers here usually sell in addition to Internet access. Honestly, I don't really understand the issue at hand. Is there a concise, less agitating explanation somewhere?
- kolme 13y ago
  I think you're taking this too lightly, to be honest. That's exactly the point of the Internet: it offers arbitrary services. Banning stuff because it could compete with other services you offer is opening the door to the internet being crippled on all ISPs. That's seriously terrifying.
  - spindritf 13y ago
    That's my complaint about this site: who's banning what? I just checked, VoIP works on the same coax that my ISP uses to provide telephone services.
    - pdpi 13y ago
      It's increasingly the case that internet, tv and telephone services are provided by a single company over a single set of infrastructure. Because those service providers have a vested interest to protect the commercial viability of their own offerings (specifically, the TV and telephone packages), there is an incentive to limit the internet service's viability as a replacement for TV and telephone services. Such limitations allow ISPs to engage in text-book antic-competitive behaviour by directly hindering their competitors, and, arguably, the "specialised services" language would allow them to do just that by treating competitors as a specialised service, and differentiating the service conditions (e.g. by throttling the bandwidth offered). Additionally, using the specialised service language, services like, say, Youtube, Facebook, Netflix or iTunes can pay ISPs to be treated as a a specialised service, offering a better-than-standard experience (lifted traffic limits, increased bandwidth). Such a treatment is sure to be pretty damn expensive, and raises a very tall hurdle that new entrants in those markets must jump if they want to compete with the incumbents on even ground. This is, once again, highly anti-competitive.
motters 13y ago
The main problem here is ISPs as a bottleneck. Longer term we need to figure out how to bypass the bottlenecks, which seem to be increasingly acting as points of political control and surveillance. Such a project would need to have a legal and technical side to it. On the legal side there would need to be an area of radio bandwidth reserved for public internet. On the technical side you need mesh networking software and hardware. There is likely to be an evolutionary path between the internet we have now and something which is less dependent upon ISPs.
- higherpurpose 13y ago
  To bypass ISPs we need to democratize the ISPs and decentralize them some more. Perhaps in the future, I could get Internet in France from a German ISP that has solar-powered drones or balloons over France, or a satellite. The longer term goal should be to create meshnets, so we can give Internet to each other. Direct censorship of stuff might not even be the biggest threat, though, but traffic shaping. We could avoid direct censorship if we build more P2P systems, which can't be "taken down". However, they probably could be throttled to a crawl, if the ISP is allowed to shape traffic and discriminate against the type of traffic they choose. Bitcoin for example can't be censored, but it can be made unusable.
  - julie1 13y ago
    The bottleneck is due to the 95th percentile way of billing and the fact big content provider don't buy the bandwidth equally for everyone. Normally you peer (free exchange), if and only if you have almost as much in as out. If you have clearly more input coming to your AS than output, you are supposed to buy your internet transit, else your behaviour is parasitic. Yes google buys internet transit, but not in Europa, they expect the users to pay for their free services when they are not north american, and they provide the "free VoIP" services this way. Google, amazon are the problems, they don't assume the cost of their services and make it stand inequally amongst the users. Google is killing the cost model of ISP. In this condition, how do you expect a sustainable free internet if you destroy the business model of ISP ?
higherpurpose 13y ago
I'm disappointed that this site for such an important issue doesn't even seem to work very well when trying to contact your MEP. It doesn't even recognize my country, and then it picks MEPs at random from multiple countries. If they didn't have something very reliable, they could've just showed you a list of countries to select your own, and then pick the MEPs which you want to e-mail (or all at once). Also, these EU organizations don't seem nearly as organized as the US ones (although the US ones aren't that great at this either). I found out about this the same day the EU Parliament had to vote on this like a month ago. Fortunately, they canceled the vote back then. Then I heard absolutely nothing about it until yesterday, again a day before the vote. These organizations need to do a better job at keeping the public updated on these Internet issues. We need an EFF of Europe.
- scribu 13y ago
  Yeah, I also got random MEPs. Resorted to clicking "choose another" until I found someone from my home country. A simple list with email address and country of origin would have been more usable.
- laumars 13y ago
  It's not just that, the colour scheme used on the site is so jarring that it makes reading the content an unpleasant experience (and that's assuming you even take it seriously as it looks almost like a prank site). In the end, I gave up and read the comments on HN to try and work out what the issue was. And I'm someone who's very keen to keep updated on issues like these, so I can't imagine how many casual visitors they'll lose because of this.
- tigerente 13y ago
  This site lets you choose and call your MEP by country: http://piphone.lqdn.fr/campaign/call2/NetNeutrality-final-apr_14#mep http://piphone.lqdn.fr/campaign/call2/NetNeutrality-final-ap...
javiermares 13y ago
How was the SOPA strike organized? We need another one, pronto.
yiedyie 13y ago
Why is not possible to have alternative internetworks?
- chrisBob 13y ago
  It is. It is just hard. The SIPRNET is the only big one I am aware of. Plus you can't tweet,email mom, Facebook stalk, or check HN from an alternative network until someone adds that functionality for you.
fellowshipofone 13y ago
Does this proposal (and Article 19 specifically in it) create a worse status quo that we have today in Europe?
facepalm 13y ago
On the one hand I think firms would just have to compete on offering as many services as possible. On the other hand I suppose if the offer is "10$ a month for free streaming of all Hollywood movies and free porn, and 10$ extra to get access to some opinions on the internet you might not agree with anyway", many people might opt for saving the 10$.
pedrocr 13y ago
This came up on reddit's /r/portugal and I had a look through their points to figure out what was going on. The legislation is here: http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/newsroom/cf/dae/document.cfm?doc_id=2734 http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/newsroom/cf/dae/docu... Their 5 points: 1) We don't want a two-tiered Internet, all data should be treated equally. Article 19 of the European Commission’s Telecoms Single Market proposal must be deleted. It's a tough article to read but as far as I can tell it says the opposite. That any ISP can operate in any part of the EU. 2) Private companies cannot be judge, jury and police over online content. Article 23.5.a. of the European Commission’s Telecoms Single Market proposal must to be deleted. 23.5.a. just says that one of the few exceptions that allow filtering is "implement a legislative provision or a court order, or prevent or impede serious crimes". That last "or" may be poorly interpreted I suppose and I don't know who gets to say what's a "serious crime". Other than that it seems reasonable. 3) Europe won the Nobel peace prize – The European Commission’s credibility on human rights issues shouldn't be jeopardized by engaging in the same type of internet censorship that Europeans critique elsewhere in the world. This isn't a demand of any sort, just a political point. 4) The current definition of "specialized service" (Article 2.15) increases costs and risk to internet users, and must be changed or deleted. I can't really see the problem with this. Once you've set rules that you can't filter/degrade service, letting your users hire specialized services on top doesn't seem out of order. I suppose the risk is that if there isn't enough competition "proper access to Netflix" may become a "specialized" service. 5) Article 23, “Freedom to provide and avail of open internet access,” must replace "shall be free" with "have the right" to protect internet users from online discrimination. This on I don't get. Maybe in legal-speak this makes a difference. I only went through the rest of this very lightly but it seemed to go in the right direction.
ehartsuyker 13y ago
To someone who knows more than me, how can a US citizen who just moved to the EU help fight this?
steeve 13y ago
Serious question: Why do we have to fight this every year? Why haven't they (the lawmakers) learn?
- Istof 13y ago
  Because businesses won't give up a chance to get more profits in. Since lobbying is legal, politicians won't give up either.
cLeEOGPw 13y ago
Well, I have sent email to a member from my country. Although it might be too late for this vote. Hope it affects his view anyway or at least rises a question or two.
luisivan 13y ago
I'm an advisor to the vicepresident of the European Commission Neelie Kroes, she is in charge of the Digital Agenda and it seems that she helped to put this forward. Although I'm in her group of Young Advisors (we're 25), I didn't know about this until today. I just sent an email to the other advisors and to some people of the European Commission to see what's up. They're always talking about how to improve net neutrality so I can't understand what's going on here. Anyway I'm really angry about this shitty law killing net neutrality. This is kind of shocking. If this law passes, I'll seriously ask myself if I want to continue in my role as an advisor.

225 points by themichael 13y ago

Net neutrality has become law in the Netherlands after a public outcry about the traffic discrimination plans of the major mobile providers. The issue is no longer only known to an obscure minority, and this in a country where the mood is very strongly against relinquishing any more autonomy to the EU. In other words: if the EU attempts to nullify Dutch net neutrality (this proposal would override Dutch law), there will likely be a considerable backlash. The EU explicitly revoking our online freedom could be the final nail in the coffin for Dutch support for the EU.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
PeterSmit 13y ago
Bullshit. The Netherlands is never ever stepping out of the EU (of which it was a founder btw), it would be economic suicide. For everyone outside The Netherlands: Net neutrality was instated after the largest telecom provider wanted to count Whatsapp messages as SMS messages. This lead to public outcry.

bad_user 13y ago

This sounds terrible. On the other hand I'd like to know what's the status quo right now in Europe. For example, are ISPs required to not block or restrict access to online services?

nyrina 13y ago
I know the Danish courts has ordered Danish ISPs to block The Pirate Bay, so I doubt the status quo is that ISPs are required not to block online services.
- higherpurpose 13y ago
  Yes, but according to this, ISPs may decide themselves to block stuff, without any court orders. This is something MPAA has been pushing for a long time with ACTA, TPP, and apparently with this, too. They want to bypass the judicial system, so they can censor stuff en masse, like they do with Google/Youtube and their automated takedowns, but since it's at the ISP level, probably at a much larger scale and in a more comprehensive way.
- atmosx 13y ago
  If this passes by and enters to action, you'll notice the difference (HN not loading, or loading extremely fast while your FB connection will go as fast as ever). If you don't have a facebook account, the you don't have internets ;-).
Ihmahr 13y ago
Here in the Netherlands we already have net neutrality, which Europe might be taking away now.

coldcode 13y ago

Our freedom online is threatened by every government, even those not our own.

tigerente 13y ago

The vote by the Parliamentary Committee on Industry, Research and Energy already took place today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7421545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7421545. The committee voted against strict network neutrality, and for the possibility of differentiated "specialized services". The bill now goes to the European Parliament for vote.

spindritf 13y ago

Is it about net neutrality ("all packets were created equal") or is it about censorship (by which I mean government actions like court orders to block sites and filters)? Or is it somehow about both? Why is it the DEATH OF THE INTERNET AS WE KNOW IT when it's a new regulation that doesn't go as far as they want in the net neutrality direction? And all they want are some adjustments? The idea of banning specialised services functionally identical to those on the Internet means banning all specialised services because you can provide arbitrary services over the Internet. Including TV and telephone which is what cable providers here usually sell in addition to Internet access. Honestly, I don't really understand the issue at hand. Is there a concise, less agitating explanation somewhere?

kolme 13y ago
I think you're taking this too lightly, to be honest. That's exactly the point of the Internet: it offers arbitrary services. Banning stuff because it could compete with other services you offer is opening the door to the internet being crippled on all ISPs. That's seriously terrifying.
- spindritf 13y ago
  That's my complaint about this site: who's banning what? I just checked, VoIP works on the same coax that my ISP uses to provide telephone services.
  - pdpi 13y ago
    It's increasingly the case that internet, tv and telephone services are provided by a single company over a single set of infrastructure. Because those service providers have a vested interest to protect the commercial viability of their own offerings (specifically, the TV and telephone packages), there is an incentive to limit the internet service's viability as a replacement for TV and telephone services. Such limitations allow ISPs to engage in text-book antic-competitive behaviour by directly hindering their competitors, and, arguably, the "specialised services" language would allow them to do just that by treating competitors as a specialised service, and differentiating the service conditions (e.g. by throttling the bandwidth offered). Additionally, using the specialised service language, services like, say, Youtube, Facebook, Netflix or iTunes can pay ISPs to be treated as a a specialised service, offering a better-than-standard experience (lifted traffic limits, increased bandwidth). Such a treatment is sure to be pretty damn expensive, and raises a very tall hurdle that new entrants in those markets must jump if they want to compete with the incumbents on even ground. This is, once again, highly anti-competitive.

motters 13y ago

The main problem here is ISPs as a bottleneck. Longer term we need to figure out how to bypass the bottlenecks, which seem to be increasingly acting as points of political control and surveillance. Such a project would need to have a legal and technical side to it. On the legal side there would need to be an area of radio bandwidth reserved for public internet. On the technical side you need mesh networking software and hardware. There is likely to be an evolutionary path between the internet we have now and something which is less dependent upon ISPs.

higherpurpose 13y ago
To bypass ISPs we need to democratize the ISPs and decentralize them some more. Perhaps in the future, I could get Internet in France from a German ISP that has solar-powered drones or balloons over France, or a satellite. The longer term goal should be to create meshnets, so we can give Internet to each other. Direct censorship of stuff might not even be the biggest threat, though, but traffic shaping. We could avoid direct censorship if we build more P2P systems, which can't be "taken down". However, they probably could be throttled to a crawl, if the ISP is allowed to shape traffic and discriminate against the type of traffic they choose. Bitcoin for example can't be censored, but it can be made unusable.
- julie1 13y ago
  The bottleneck is due to the 95th percentile way of billing and the fact big content provider don't buy the bandwidth equally for everyone. Normally you peer (free exchange), if and only if you have almost as much in as out. If you have clearly more input coming to your AS than output, you are supposed to buy your internet transit, else your behaviour is parasitic. Yes google buys internet transit, but not in Europa, they expect the users to pay for their free services when they are not north american, and they provide the "free VoIP" services this way. Google, amazon are the problems, they don't assume the cost of their services and make it stand inequally amongst the users. Google is killing the cost model of ISP. In this condition, how do you expect a sustainable free internet if you destroy the business model of ISP ?

higherpurpose 13y ago

I'm disappointed that this site for such an important issue doesn't even seem to work very well when trying to contact your MEP. It doesn't even recognize my country, and then it picks MEPs at random from multiple countries. If they didn't have something very reliable, they could've just showed you a list of countries to select your own, and then pick the MEPs which you want to e-mail (or all at once). Also, these EU organizations don't seem nearly as organized as the US ones (although the US ones aren't that great at this either). I found out about this the same day the EU Parliament had to vote on this like a month ago. Fortunately, they canceled the vote back then. Then I heard absolutely nothing about it until yesterday, again a day before the vote. These organizations need to do a better job at keeping the public updated on these Internet issues. We need an EFF of Europe.

scribu 13y ago
Yeah, I also got random MEPs. Resorted to clicking "choose another" until I found someone from my home country. A simple list with email address and country of origin would have been more usable.
laumars 13y ago
It's not just that, the colour scheme used on the site is so jarring that it makes reading the content an unpleasant experience (and that's assuming you even take it seriously as it looks almost like a prank site). In the end, I gave up and read the comments on HN to try and work out what the issue was. And I'm someone who's very keen to keep updated on issues like these, so I can't imagine how many casual visitors they'll lose because of this.
tigerente 13y ago
This site lets you choose and call your MEP by country: http://piphone.lqdn.fr/campaign/call2/NetNeutrality-final-apr_14#mep http://piphone.lqdn.fr/campaign/call2/NetNeutrality-final-ap...

javiermares 13y ago

How was the SOPA strike organized? We need another one, pronto.

yiedyie 13y ago

Why is not possible to have alternative internetworks?

chrisBob 13y ago
It is. It is just hard. The SIPRNET is the only big one I am aware of. Plus you can't tweet,email mom, Facebook stalk, or check HN from an alternative network until someone adds that functionality for you.

fellowshipofone 13y ago

Does this proposal (and Article 19 specifically in it) create a worse status quo that we have today in Europe?

facepalm 13y ago

On the one hand I think firms would just have to compete on offering as many services as possible. On the other hand I suppose if the offer is "10$ a month for free streaming of all Hollywood movies and free porn, and 10$ extra to get access to some opinions on the internet you might not agree with anyway", many people might opt for saving the 10$.

pedrocr 13y ago

This came up on reddit's /r/portugal and I had a look through their points to figure out what was going on. The legislation is here: http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/newsroom/cf/dae/document.cfm?doc_id=2734 http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/newsroom/cf/dae/docu... Their 5 points: 1) We don't want a two-tiered Internet, all data should be treated equally. Article 19 of the European Commission’s Telecoms Single Market proposal must be deleted. It's a tough article to read but as far as I can tell it says the opposite. That any ISP can operate in any part of the EU. 2) Private companies cannot be judge, jury and police over online content. Article 23.5.a. of the European Commission’s Telecoms Single Market proposal must to be deleted. 23.5.a. just says that one of the few exceptions that allow filtering is "implement a legislative provision or a court order, or prevent or impede serious crimes". That last "or" may be poorly interpreted I suppose and I don't know who gets to say what's a "serious crime". Other than that it seems reasonable. 3) Europe won the Nobel peace prize – The European Commission’s credibility on human rights issues shouldn't be jeopardized by engaging in the same type of internet censorship that Europeans critique elsewhere in the world. This isn't a demand of any sort, just a political point. 4) The current definition of "specialized service" (Article 2.15) increases costs and risk to internet users, and must be changed or deleted. I can't really see the problem with this. Once you've set rules that you can't filter/degrade service, letting your users hire specialized services on top doesn't seem out of order. I suppose the risk is that if there isn't enough competition "proper access to Netflix" may become a "specialized" service. 5) Article 23, “Freedom to provide and avail of open internet access,” must replace "shall be free" with "have the right" to protect internet users from online discrimination. This on I don't get. Maybe in legal-speak this makes a difference. I only went through the rest of this very lightly but it seemed to go in the right direction.

ehartsuyker 13y ago

To someone who knows more than me, how can a US citizen who just moved to the EU help fight this?

steeve 13y ago

Serious question: Why do we have to fight this every year? Why haven't they (the lawmakers) learn?

Istof 13y ago
Because businesses won't give up a chance to get more profits in. Since lobbying is legal, politicians won't give up either.

cLeEOGPw 13y ago

Well, I have sent email to a member from my country. Although it might be too late for this vote. Hope it affects his view anyway or at least rises a question or two.

luisivan 13y ago

I'm an advisor to the vicepresident of the European Commission Neelie Kroes, she is in charge of the Digital Agenda and it seems that she helped to put this forward. Although I'm in her group of Young Advisors (we're 25), I didn't know about this until today. I just sent an email to the other advisors and to some people of the European Commission to see what's up. They're always talking about how to improve net neutrality so I can't understand what's going on here. Anyway I'm really angry about this shitty law killing net neutrality. This is kind of shocking. If this law passes, I'll seriously ask myself if I want to continue in my role as an advisor.