SaveTheInternetEU

Great questions!

For users, net neutrality means that you get to decide how to use your connection. It means that ISPs like Comcast or Deutsche Telekom can't start calling the shots and bully you into using certain websites or apps instead of others.

ISPs are against net neutrality because they can profit from this interference. They want to start selling privileged internet fast lanes to big websites. But apart from the ISPs and their chosen partners, everybody else loses. Startups will have much more trouble in beating their big competitors. And non-profits and public services will probably be hit even harder! Net neutrality keeps the internet a level playing field, rather than selling connections to the highest bidder.

Think of it like electricity companies. Could you imagine if they start selling special kilowatts which only work with certain devices? Profitable for the electricity company, but awful for everyone else. That's a road you definitely don't want to go down.

We want to protect the Internet as an open platform in Europe and guarantee equal access for everyone to this global neutral infrastructure. In Europe this means getting regulators (BEREC) to understand the importance of Net Neutrality.

That is a good example. When ISPs are allowed to choose favourites, the Internet is no longer an equal platform for everyone and the big corporations will have an advantage over startups, non-commercial projects or low-cost speakers.

It doesn't really matter if the discrimination is technical (throttling) or economic (zero-rating, price discrimination), the logic is always the same. Both create an incentive for an ISP to create artificial scarcity (low bandwidth, low data volumes) and then monetise that scarcity by selling the prioritisation to those that can pay. It is called double sided market.

Zero-rating is definitely our biggest concern in the current draft guidelines.

The dutch government shows that the underlying telecom single market law from the EU can be read in exactly the way that we want. Namely, to prohibit harmful commercial practices (zero-rating) with a clear bright-line rule, instead of a muddy case-by-case assessment. Now we have to convince BEREC to be brave and follow the dutch example. (:

btw: it is not just Holland, India and Canada are also great examples when it comes to zero-rating. Hopefully we can get as many responses to the consultation as India did!

help us: https://savetheinternet.eu

Other issues are specialised services (paid fast-lanes on the Internet) and traffic management (maybe the death of the best effort Internet).

There is a real problem at the core of this debate and this is how to connect more people to the Internet, because it doesn't matter which education or income you have. Internet is great for empowering all social classes.

But there are good and bad reactions to that problem. The Indian reaction to Facebooks Free Basics was very clear. The people resent the idea of an american company defining which services they can use, they see it "as digital colonialism". Zuckerberg wants to expand Free Basics even to Europe, we think that's a really horrible idea!

There are other alternatives, like the Alliance for affordable Internet and many other forms of zero-rating that are application-agnostic and don't interfere with the equal choices of users.