7 ms·

Europe reverses course on net neutrality legislation

92 points by mercurial 12y ago

twiceaday 12y ago
This loophole will definitely not be abused. /s
r00fus 12y ago
Does anyone have more information on what qualifies a service to be "special" enough to qualify for the loophole? It's amazing to me that no qualifying factor is included in the legislation.
fuligo 12y ago
This is why I fear net neutrality (and the internet as we know it) don't stand a chance. A lot has been accomplished with public awareness and public outcry has repeatedly averted disaster - so far. But the proponents of this come back with another attempt at least once a year, in both Europe and the US, and they have money on their side. It's amazing net neutrality has gone on as long as it did, against vast corporate and political interests. Whereas net neutrality advocates have to beat this back every time everywhere, their opposition has to be successful only once, and only in one of these regions, for the whole thing to fall. It is, I'm afraid, just a matter of time.
- orthecreedence 12y ago
  It's very true it's a war. Each win we get against idiot corporations is a battle won, but the war rages on. Hard to say if it'll ever be "won." It's especially hard when so many people are spouting stuff about how the free market will solve this (if I got a dollar every time "free market" was the drooled out answer to a complicated problem...). It's like we have to convince a critical mass of our peers of the benefits of free speech every time the issue comes up. However, it's still important we fight each battle, each time one rears its ugly head, wherever it happens, with whatever resources we have available. The internet is too powerful a tool to be left in the hands of greedy slimeballs. It's the great equalizer. Anyone can have a voice, and anyone can listen to that voice, whether you're a giant corporation or a 12 year-old kid with a good idea. It's worth the struggle.
  - icebraining 12y ago
    I don't claim the free market can solve the problem. I claim that, at least in my (European) country, the free market has avoided it. I live in a city of a few thousand, I have four ISPs offering me fiber service, I'm paying $30/month for 100mbps plus TV and free phone calls, and I have absolutely no evidence that any of ISPs is trying to slow down some traffic. I'm not ideologically opposed to net neutrality regulations - I think they can be a useful tool after you fuck things up, like the US did. What I dispute is the idea that suddenly everyone has that problem just because the US does. How about letting each country implement its own net neutrality laws if and when they're needed?
  - SixSigma 12y ago
    The free market would solve it. ISPs do not operate in a free market.
    - tormeh 12y ago
      The problem is that the capital expenditures required to wire up houses creates natural monopolies; no government interference required. The free market will dysfunction in such a situation. The capital expenditure required for downtown areas may not be that high, though. Government may extend the natural monopolies to rich, urban areas by requiring ISPs to wire up poor areas, thus increasing capital expenditure. Government may make the natural monopoly worse (or better), but the problem is a natural part of the business.
    - coldpie 12y ago
      I'm gonna drop a train on you. Unless you're seriously suggesting living in an anarchic society where might means right, there is no such thing as a "free market." There are only differing levels of regulation. At a very minimum you need some body to enforce contract law. More specifically to this issue, you have the problem of running lines to peoples' houses. With no regulation and no sharing of poles/lines, you'd have very high barriers to entry (read: monopolies, bad for consumers) and dozens or hundreds of poles and lines in every yard (bad for the environment and the people who live in it). So okay, you build a few lines and enforce the line owners to share the lines equally to create a "free market" in the service provider space. But now you've introduced regulation and destroyed the "free market" in the line and pole provider space. Boy, this is complicated, isn't it? It's almost like "free market" isn't a magic incantation that fixes everything.
kristoffer 12y ago
Sorry guys but reality is that on a technical level some packets must be treated as higher priority. Think voice communication, for example. It must be prioritized over bulk data transfers. It is already built into LTE. The future holds more use cases. Remote surgery, autonomous vehicles etc etc.
- quonn 12y ago
  LTE voice communication is not a very good example, since it is provided by your mobile carrier, even with LTE. It's not an internet service. I can't see how autonomous vehicles necessarily require any kind of priority access to the network. Remote surgery is a pipe dream - it has been discussed 20 years ago and nobody cares. It's certainly not worth destroying the network just for that.
  - kristoffer 12y ago
    With prioritization one could ensure better quality of services also for OTT voip which would certainly be useful. There will certainly exist more and more services in need of low latency. Why stop innovation in this area by just giving up and saying that no such traffic might exist? If you read the article there is still strong wording to protect the network as such. It is just that certain services needs lower latency and/or higher reliability. This is nothing new. But with the network nowadays full with 70% video you need to handle it.
  - KaiserPro 12y ago
    LTE is all IP, so thats about as internet as you can possibly get.
  - xxxyy 12y ago
    LTE is a packet switching solution, so without traffic prioritization regular cellular voice calls could easily be trumped by a few heavy torrenters.
- bryanrasmussen 12y ago
  I think this is what the EU ruling is taking into account as well, this doesn't seem to be about breaking down protections so that some corporations can screw over their customers - as it is in the U.S - but about proper regulation.
KaiserPro 12y ago
We don't have the same problem in europe with net neutrality. The problem in the states is very very different. In the states you have three corporations providing shit, slow service. Th Traffic shaping, which stops one person on a contented link (ie ADSL) ruining everyone else's day by torrenting every last drop of bandwidth. Its been a fact of life for many years. THe problem in the states can be characterised in two ways: * A lack of competition There is often only one ISP in town, and they don't have to try hard. This means that service is terrible, and so is innovation. * A lack of bandwidth In Europe bandwidth exchanges, or peering exchanges are normally run by a cooperative. This means that its in everyone's interest to talk to everyone else as fast as possible. Its really really cheap to peer in london, (http://www.lonap.net/fees.shtml http://www.lonap.net/fees.shtml) In the states, exchanges are run by either AT&T, verizon or level3. Which means everything costs squillions. As there is no need to provide more bandwidth, because customers can't move between ISPs so no one peers. For example in the EU, ISPs are more than keen to have CDN leaf nodes in their infrastructure, it lowers costs and improves customer experiences. However they can't charge Netflix et al to install them because there is too much competition. Its not like they can limit access to netflix for a few months to make a point, because their customers would change ISPs. Something not possible in the States. So net neutrality is really a side issue to competition.
- chimeracoder 12y ago
  > So net neutrality is really a side issue to competition. No, net neutrality is not a side-issue to competition. Competition would mitigate some of the harms of non-neutrality, but it does not address the full picture. Non-discrimination is essential both for consumers and for content producers[0]. Non-neutrality has an incredibly chilling effect on business, even if it only applies to a portion of the population[1]. We need both neutrality and competition; we can't sacrifice either one for the other. [0] ie, web companies, startups [1] https://avc.com/2014/01/vc-pitches-in-a-year-or-two/ https://avc.com/2014/01/vc-pitches-in-a-year-or-two/
  - KaiserPro 12y ago
    As someone who works for a content producer, the only place to make money is in the gatekeeping to content. Once again, with competition that sort of practice doesn't work. If a service is popular it will cost customers to ban it. Nokia phones came with music for the best part of 3 years, it didn't stop the rise of spotify. (back when data cost £1 a megabyte) Spotify is bundled with many contracts here in the UK, but people still use other services. None of those VC ideas are businesses, it won't be net neutrality that stops them it'll be common sense. Who invests in clones of already loss making services?
lorddoig 12y ago
Net neutrality is very important, but it occurs to me that when we finally figure out that we don't need separate telephone lines, cable tv, etc - i.e. when we realise it's all just data and one-pipe-fits-all - then it seems fairly obvious that your neighbours 999/911 VoIP call should perhaps not be drowned out by 4K Netflix. And neither should your burglar alarm. Or panic button. Or self-driving car. Or robotic doctor. It's an issue in its infancy now, sure, but it will become a problem.
- kybernetikos 12y ago
  Restrictions based on traffic type (as long as they're clearly indicated to the customer buying the service) are much less pernicious than restrictions based on origin or destination. I think reasonable arrangements can be made that don't destroy some of the best things about the open internet.
- Arnt 12y ago
  The issue has stayed in its infancy for 35 years so far (Jon Postel wrote about it in January 1980), so do you think it will become a bigger problem in the next five? Ten? Twenty? If so, why?
  - kristoffer 12y ago
    The answer to that should be pretty obvious. How many different services relied on internet in 1980? How many will in twenty years? And I'm not sure the issue still is in its infancy. It's becoming a problem and it's stopping further innovation. I think we really need to think about "internet 2.0".
    - Arnt 12y ago
      "Many" and "even more". That's not the point. The internet has added hosts, users and services every year since 1980. It didn't cross a threshold to need priority blah in 1981, not in 1982 either, not in any of the 33 following years. What's so special about the 36th year? Or the 40th?
- 12y ago
hereonbusiness 12y ago
>The proposals did not go unopposed. More than 100 MEPs signed a letter to the Telecoms council that accused it of "lacking ambition". "Weakened proposals on net neutrality go against the European Parliament's repeated calls for clear definitions," it read. "We call on you to have clearly defined net neutrality rules for Europe." I think this is the important part, yes some services probably should be considered special, many people here mention VoIP as an example, but it must be clearly defined in the law, we must not give ISPs the power to decide what is special because the law would be become effectively worthless.
- icebraining 12y ago
  And then a new service that requires low latency appears. Have fun waiting for the European Parliament to vote on it, for the EC to ratify the change, and for each member state to turn it into law. But hey, I'm sure the providers of the services that are already in the law (like VoIP) will be very grateful for this rent you've granted them.
  - hereonbusiness 12y ago
    What would be the alternative, should we just get rid of the laws then? I think that would be an order of magnitude worse than having to wait. Also, in my mind special would mean that the service is of great public importance, it doesn't seem likely to me for such things just turn up every other day.
    - icebraining 12y ago
      What would be the alternative, should we just get rid of the laws then? I think that would be an order of magnitude worse than having to wait. We don't have net neutrality laws in Europe right now to get rid of. The alternative is doing nothing, which in my experience is working pretty well. Are you European? Are ISPs in your area trying to slow down some traffic? If not, what problem exactly are you trying to solve? And even if you are having problems, why do they must be solved at the EU level? Also, in my mind special would mean that the service is of great public importance, it doesn't seem likely to me for such things just turn up every other day. Services don't appear and are suddenly recognized as of great importance. They start small and unimportant until they gain enough momentum to be recognized by the public at large. And they'll never will if you enshrine into law the privilege of existing ones.
amelius 12y ago
I can already see the future: IP packets with prioritization and billing information in their headers.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
ticking 12y ago
TL;DR The only problem is that ISPs love to oversell their capacities. And important services don't need that much bandwidth. NN has nothing to do with this. The "911 calls should not be interrupted by torrents" is such a load of crap argument. It has nothing to do with net neutrality but is all about service level agreements. With landlines, the main problem here is not that your neighbour could prevent you from making a 911 call by torrenting, but that his torrenting affects your bandwidth at all. When you buy 10mbit from your ISP, you should _always_ be provided with that speed, and the ISP should take measures to ensure that. Not on a per service level, but on a per customer basis. But instead ISPs like to sell "up to 25mbit" offers which actually means "0mbit guaranteed, the rest is lottery" because you share that "25mbit" connection with everybody on the street. Mobile contracts are a bit trickier, because there the topology is unknown and can change anytime, but even here we can calculate a lower bound if we take into account that each lte cell can only support a few hundred [(maybe a few thousand, if you have really fancy tech and own a very wide frequency spectrum)](https://www.linkedin.com/groups/Plz-anyone-help-me-How-1180727.S.217555082 https://www.linkedin.com/groups/Plz-anyone-help-me-How-11807...) connections at the same time. Even if we assumed that an lte cell can have an utopian 10.000 _active_ users using every available frequency, we would still be left with 300mbit/10.000=30kbit per user, [which is still enough for that goddamn 911 call.](http://www.erlang.com/bandwidth.html http://www.erlang.com/bandwidth.html)

92 points by mercurial 12y ago

This loophole will definitely not be abused. /s

Does anyone have more information on what qualifies a service to be "special" enough to qualify for the loophole? It's amazing to me that no qualifying factor is included in the legislation.

fuligo 12y ago

This is why I fear net neutrality (and the internet as we know it) don't stand a chance. A lot has been accomplished with public awareness and public outcry has repeatedly averted disaster - so far. But the proponents of this come back with another attempt at least once a year, in both Europe and the US, and they have money on their side. It's amazing net neutrality has gone on as long as it did, against vast corporate and political interests. Whereas net neutrality advocates have to beat this back every time everywhere, their opposition has to be successful only once, and only in one of these regions, for the whole thing to fall. It is, I'm afraid, just a matter of time.

orthecreedence 12y ago
It's very true it's a war. Each win we get against idiot corporations is a battle won, but the war rages on. Hard to say if it'll ever be "won." It's especially hard when so many people are spouting stuff about how the free market will solve this (if I got a dollar every time "free market" was the drooled out answer to a complicated problem...). It's like we have to convince a critical mass of our peers of the benefits of free speech every time the issue comes up. However, it's still important we fight each battle, each time one rears its ugly head, wherever it happens, with whatever resources we have available. The internet is too powerful a tool to be left in the hands of greedy slimeballs. It's the great equalizer. Anyone can have a voice, and anyone can listen to that voice, whether you're a giant corporation or a 12 year-old kid with a good idea. It's worth the struggle.
- icebraining 12y ago
  I don't claim the free market can solve the problem. I claim that, at least in my (European) country, the free market has avoided it. I live in a city of a few thousand, I have four ISPs offering me fiber service, I'm paying $30/month for 100mbps plus TV and free phone calls, and I have absolutely no evidence that any of ISPs is trying to slow down some traffic. I'm not ideologically opposed to net neutrality regulations - I think they can be a useful tool after you fuck things up, like the US did. What I dispute is the idea that suddenly everyone has that problem just because the US does. How about letting each country implement its own net neutrality laws if and when they're needed?
- SixSigma 12y ago
  The free market would solve it. ISPs do not operate in a free market.
  - tormeh 12y ago
    The problem is that the capital expenditures required to wire up houses creates natural monopolies; no government interference required. The free market will dysfunction in such a situation. The capital expenditure required for downtown areas may not be that high, though. Government may extend the natural monopolies to rich, urban areas by requiring ISPs to wire up poor areas, thus increasing capital expenditure. Government may make the natural monopoly worse (or better), but the problem is a natural part of the business.
  - coldpie 12y ago
    I'm gonna drop a train on you. Unless you're seriously suggesting living in an anarchic society where might means right, there is no such thing as a "free market." There are only differing levels of regulation. At a very minimum you need some body to enforce contract law. More specifically to this issue, you have the problem of running lines to peoples' houses. With no regulation and no sharing of poles/lines, you'd have very high barriers to entry (read: monopolies, bad for consumers) and dozens or hundreds of poles and lines in every yard (bad for the environment and the people who live in it). So okay, you build a few lines and enforce the line owners to share the lines equally to create a "free market" in the service provider space. But now you've introduced regulation and destroyed the "free market" in the line and pole provider space. Boy, this is complicated, isn't it? It's almost like "free market" isn't a magic incantation that fixes everything.

kristoffer 12y ago

Sorry guys but reality is that on a technical level some packets must be treated as higher priority. Think voice communication, for example. It must be prioritized over bulk data transfers. It is already built into LTE. The future holds more use cases. Remote surgery, autonomous vehicles etc etc.

quonn 12y ago
LTE voice communication is not a very good example, since it is provided by your mobile carrier, even with LTE. It's not an internet service. I can't see how autonomous vehicles necessarily require any kind of priority access to the network. Remote surgery is a pipe dream - it has been discussed 20 years ago and nobody cares. It's certainly not worth destroying the network just for that.
- kristoffer 12y ago
  With prioritization one could ensure better quality of services also for OTT voip which would certainly be useful. There will certainly exist more and more services in need of low latency. Why stop innovation in this area by just giving up and saying that no such traffic might exist? If you read the article there is still strong wording to protect the network as such. It is just that certain services needs lower latency and/or higher reliability. This is nothing new. But with the network nowadays full with 70% video you need to handle it.
- KaiserPro 12y ago
  LTE is all IP, so thats about as internet as you can possibly get.
- xxxyy 12y ago
  LTE is a packet switching solution, so without traffic prioritization regular cellular voice calls could easily be trumped by a few heavy torrenters.
bryanrasmussen 12y ago
I think this is what the EU ruling is taking into account as well, this doesn't seem to be about breaking down protections so that some corporations can screw over their customers - as it is in the U.S - but about proper regulation.

KaiserPro 12y ago

We don't have the same problem in europe with net neutrality. The problem in the states is very very different. In the states you have three corporations providing shit, slow service. Th Traffic shaping, which stops one person on a contented link (ie ADSL) ruining everyone else's day by torrenting every last drop of bandwidth. Its been a fact of life for many years. THe problem in the states can be characterised in two ways: * A lack of competition There is often only one ISP in town, and they don't have to try hard. This means that service is terrible, and so is innovation. * A lack of bandwidth In Europe bandwidth exchanges, or peering exchanges are normally run by a cooperative. This means that its in everyone's interest to talk to everyone else as fast as possible. Its really really cheap to peer in london, (http://www.lonap.net/fees.shtml http://www.lonap.net/fees.shtml) In the states, exchanges are run by either AT&T, verizon or level3. Which means everything costs squillions. As there is no need to provide more bandwidth, because customers can't move between ISPs so no one peers. For example in the EU, ISPs are more than keen to have CDN leaf nodes in their infrastructure, it lowers costs and improves customer experiences. However they can't charge Netflix et al to install them because there is too much competition. Its not like they can limit access to netflix for a few months to make a point, because their customers would change ISPs. Something not possible in the States. So net neutrality is really a side issue to competition.

chimeracoder 12y ago
> So net neutrality is really a side issue to competition. No, net neutrality is not a side-issue to competition. Competition would mitigate some of the harms of non-neutrality, but it does not address the full picture. Non-discrimination is essential both for consumers and for content producers[0]. Non-neutrality has an incredibly chilling effect on business, even if it only applies to a portion of the population[1]. We need both neutrality and competition; we can't sacrifice either one for the other. [0] ie, web companies, startups [1] https://avc.com/2014/01/vc-pitches-in-a-year-or-two/ https://avc.com/2014/01/vc-pitches-in-a-year-or-two/
- KaiserPro 12y ago
  As someone who works for a content producer, the only place to make money is in the gatekeeping to content. Once again, with competition that sort of practice doesn't work. If a service is popular it will cost customers to ban it. Nokia phones came with music for the best part of 3 years, it didn't stop the rise of spotify. (back when data cost £1 a megabyte) Spotify is bundled with many contracts here in the UK, but people still use other services. None of those VC ideas are businesses, it won't be net neutrality that stops them it'll be common sense. Who invests in clones of already loss making services?

lorddoig 12y ago

Net neutrality is very important, but it occurs to me that when we finally figure out that we don't need separate telephone lines, cable tv, etc - i.e. when we realise it's all just data and one-pipe-fits-all - then it seems fairly obvious that your neighbours 999/911 VoIP call should perhaps not be drowned out by 4K Netflix. And neither should your burglar alarm. Or panic button. Or self-driving car. Or robotic doctor. It's an issue in its infancy now, sure, but it will become a problem.

kybernetikos 12y ago
Restrictions based on traffic type (as long as they're clearly indicated to the customer buying the service) are much less pernicious than restrictions based on origin or destination. I think reasonable arrangements can be made that don't destroy some of the best things about the open internet.
Arnt 12y ago
The issue has stayed in its infancy for 35 years so far (Jon Postel wrote about it in January 1980), so do you think it will become a bigger problem in the next five? Ten? Twenty? If so, why?
- kristoffer 12y ago
  The answer to that should be pretty obvious. How many different services relied on internet in 1980? How many will in twenty years? And I'm not sure the issue still is in its infancy. It's becoming a problem and it's stopping further innovation. I think we really need to think about "internet 2.0".
  - Arnt 12y ago
    "Many" and "even more". That's not the point. The internet has added hosts, users and services every year since 1980. It didn't cross a threshold to need priority blah in 1981, not in 1982 either, not in any of the 33 following years. What's so special about the 36th year? Or the 40th?
12y ago

hereonbusiness 12y ago

>The proposals did not go unopposed. More than 100 MEPs signed a letter to the Telecoms council that accused it of "lacking ambition". "Weakened proposals on net neutrality go against the European Parliament's repeated calls for clear definitions," it read. "We call on you to have clearly defined net neutrality rules for Europe." I think this is the important part, yes some services probably should be considered special, many people here mention VoIP as an example, but it must be clearly defined in the law, we must not give ISPs the power to decide what is special because the law would be become effectively worthless.

icebraining 12y ago
And then a new service that requires low latency appears. Have fun waiting for the European Parliament to vote on it, for the EC to ratify the change, and for each member state to turn it into law. But hey, I'm sure the providers of the services that are already in the law (like VoIP) will be very grateful for this rent you've granted them.
- hereonbusiness 12y ago
  What would be the alternative, should we just get rid of the laws then? I think that would be an order of magnitude worse than having to wait. Also, in my mind special would mean that the service is of great public importance, it doesn't seem likely to me for such things just turn up every other day.
  - icebraining 12y ago
    What would be the alternative, should we just get rid of the laws then? I think that would be an order of magnitude worse than having to wait. We don't have net neutrality laws in Europe right now to get rid of. The alternative is doing nothing, which in my experience is working pretty well. Are you European? Are ISPs in your area trying to slow down some traffic? If not, what problem exactly are you trying to solve? And even if you are having problems, why do they must be solved at the EU level? Also, in my mind special would mean that the service is of great public importance, it doesn't seem likely to me for such things just turn up every other day. Services don't appear and are suddenly recognized as of great importance. They start small and unimportant until they gain enough momentum to be recognized by the public at large. And they'll never will if you enshrine into law the privilege of existing ones.

amelius 12y ago

I can already see the future: IP packets with prioritization and billing information in their headers.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

ticking 12y ago

TL;DR The only problem is that ISPs love to oversell their capacities. And important services don't need that much bandwidth. NN has nothing to do with this. The "911 calls should not be interrupted by torrents" is such a load of crap argument. It has nothing to do with net neutrality but is all about service level agreements. With landlines, the main problem here is not that your neighbour could prevent you from making a 911 call by torrenting, but that his torrenting affects your bandwidth at all. When you buy 10mbit from your ISP, you should _always_ be provided with that speed, and the ISP should take measures to ensure that. Not on a per service level, but on a per customer basis. But instead ISPs like to sell "up to 25mbit" offers which actually means "0mbit guaranteed, the rest is lottery" because you share that "25mbit" connection with everybody on the street. Mobile contracts are a bit trickier, because there the topology is unknown and can change anytime, but even here we can calculate a lower bound if we take into account that each lte cell can only support a few hundred [(maybe a few thousand, if you have really fancy tech and own a very wide frequency spectrum)](https://www.linkedin.com/groups/Plz-anyone-help-me-How-1180727.S.217555082 https://www.linkedin.com/groups/Plz-anyone-help-me-How-11807...) connections at the same time. Even if we assumed that an lte cell can have an utopian 10.000 _active_ users using every available frequency, we would still be left with 300mbit/10.000=30kbit per user, [which is still enough for that goddamn 911 call.](http://www.erlang.com/bandwidth.html http://www.erlang.com/bandwidth.html)