The European Parliament has voted against a set of rules meant to protect “net neutrality” Europe, the BBC reports.
Campaigners for net neutrality—the principle that internet service providers shouldn’t be able to favor or block certain products or websites—argue that existing legislation makes it too easy for internet firms to make deals with content providers (in many cases for financial gain).
Rather than stifling the internet with regulation, government legislation in favor of net neutrality, (as was passed in the US in February), is intended to actually make the web freer because it prevents providers from effectively making their own rules. And it decides who does or doesn’t get an efficient service.
Without effective regulation and neutrality, concerns in Europe include “zero rating” agreements, in which customers can access certain sites and services for free, outside of their data plans. In Belgium, for example, some communications companies currently allow unlimited access to Twitter and Facebook while all other data usage is part of a monthly plan.
Big companies in favor of neutrality
Several tech companies, Netflix, Tumblr, Vimeo, Kickstarter, and Reddit, signed a letter to the president of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz, asking that neutrality-improving amendments be adopted. A lack of neutrality is a concern for such companies because of the fees they may end up paying, just as it is for smaller projects who may be disadvantaged because they can’t pay the fees.
“I was contacted by a number of start-ups and investors because they were deeply concerned about the impact of the European Parliament’s network neutrality proposals on start-up innovation in Europe,” said Stanford professor Barbara van Schewick, who helped pen the letter.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web, also joined the argument.
“If adopted as currently written, these rules will threaten innovation, free speech and privacy, and compromise Europe’s ability to lead in the digital economy,” he wrote in a blog.
Is neutrality fair?
On the flipside of the debate, it’s argued that service providers are shouldering a heavy burden in covering the substantial costs of a smoothly running internet.
“The fact is that what we use the internet for in 2015 is vastly different from those early days when Tim Berners-Lee was inventing the web,” said Chris Green of the business consultancy Lewis, pointing out that the rise of video streaming had placed extra burdens on network companies.
“Maintaining that information flow is an expensive process and the cost of running that infrastructure is falling on the shoulders of ISPs. For them, a two-tier internet makes much more sense.”
The European Union intends to soon abolish heavy data roaming charges within Europe, and some experts suggest that politicians may have voted against the net neutrality amendments because they thought doing otherwise might interfere with the data roaming proposals.
—–
Feature Image: Thinkstock
Comments