I'm not entirely sure what to think about it. The parliament adopted a 'strong' version of net neutrality in their eyes but it has left (although it seems very limited) the possibility open for ISP's to throttle on bandwidth. The voting of the parliament doesn't make the decision final. There is still the Council of Ministers who have to give their opinion. The document above gives an overview of the accepted amendments with a definition of net neutrality that could be operating across the EU soon.
The way I read it, throttlling is outlawed unless it is necessary to prevent the providers network from collapsing. But then he has to throttle everything and not just youtube and netflix. A great step forward that is.
I saw on the BBC that they would be voting on this and I was just facepalming and this afternoon I went on the EU parliament webpage and saw that they did a great job . Wohoooo Europe FTW . Here is the link if anyone wants to have a look http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/news-room/content/20140331IPR41232/html/Ensure-open-access-for-internet-service-suppliers-and-ban-roaming-fees-say-MEPs
Yup, it's a pretty good thing. It's awful redaction, but that's just because there are a lot of political and industry dilettantes mutilating the original proposals before it even comes to the assembly, and that's just the way it goes these days, everything has to read like a child suffocation warning on a plastic bag before politicians and large corporate legals are even capable of understanding it.
But the idea is very good: dedicated services cannot touch the standard bandwidth, period. That means that if an ISP makes a deal with a paid content provider, he has to step up bandwidth first, and he cannot reserve that extra bandwidth just for that service. So everybody wins. The long term idea is that basic broadband connection should be free for everybody, and that the running costs and infra investments should be born by commercial services only.
This is not going to be understood by a lot of US people, because in the EU, the ISP's are not the content vendors, like in the US, and in the EU, internet access is about to become a fundamental right, and there are a lot of community projects to offer free internet everywhere, notwithstanding the fact that the service providers may be held responsible for potential criminal activity their service were used for, which is a principle that is unheard of in the US. The EU interpretation of net neutrality and the link to free broadband internet for all everywhere, would be unheard of in the US, just like it's unheard of that university professors give their syllabi to a student run not-for-profit cooperation to print them as cheap as possible and sell them to the students for basically the price of the paper. But I guess the EU are just ugly socialists, right?
notwithstanding the fact that the service providers may be held responsible for potential criminal activity their service were used for,
Only if they can be blamed. Right now service providers have to receive a written warning stating their service is used for criminal activities and they need to make it stop, before they can be taken to court.
The European Court of Justice just stated the other day, that such block of sites providing illegal content, may be blocked by service providers. Case was about the infamous kino.to-site:
Yup, but that's concerning commercial ISP's only. Private non-commercial internet access granting, like in my example, can be even trickier, in fact, I probably shouldn't have used "may" but "will probably" instead, depending on the country in the EU. In Germany, the rule is that you're held responsible for everything that happens through your connection, and basically only the default criminal exonerations apply, which most often put the burden of proof on the connection subscriber. Luckily, the police and criminal investigation authorities show quite a healthy dose of common sense in this, it's nowhere near as wild as in the US, and basically very focused towards internet fraud, kiddie porn and dangerous extremist activities. Hacker persecution with maximum prejudice like in the US was luckily left behind after Karl Koch.
The kino.to case is a bit of an odd case, in that sense that the real matter was de facto settled long before the European Court of Justice had their say, so that their decision was not really based on the fact of the matter as such, but was just a decision of principle without real consequences, whereby the main argument they had to consider was whether or not the principle was so fundamental that they were prepared to seriously hinder normal jurisdiction that did touch the fact of the matter. The ECJ doesn't create legislation, it's not common law like in anglo-american systems, the decision doesn't say more than what it says, and the ECJ doesn't take away any jurisdiction from the normal courts. The ECJ in this case merely acted as a kind of "prejudicial instance", offering advice on principles, and if the court would have hurt those supranational principles, it would have merely sent back the case to that court with a binding interpretation of the supranational principle, insofar it were hurt. Here the ECJ decided - quite correctly - that the principle was not hurt. That doesn't mean that the ECK supports blocking of sites by ISP's, that just means that the ECJ thinks that - in the specific kino.to case, where there was an obvious violation of copyrights by the website - there is no supranational principle hurt when the ISP, in good faith, and in order to protect his own rights, blocks the kino.to website that is obviously violating third party rights, even when there is no court decision yet that that website is actually violating rights. It's very important to mention that in the kino.to case, the website was taken down by the owners spontaneously as soon as the problem arose, and that they only pushed the court case so far in an attempt to evade the fines and reparations to which they were sentenced.
Guys you really need to watch what's happening on bbc world news , they are saying that what the EU parliament did was just to win votes, the bottom line is that this is a bad thing and that content creators should pay for the used bandwidth (even if we as consumers already do) . And btw on their website the article covering this subject doesn't seem that biast but it does say that this law will enable child abuse . Have a look http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-26865869
Yeah, so does sending people to school or bible class...
The UK is the hardest opponent for positive change of anything relating to innovation in the EU. It's just part of the reactionary anglo-american corporate political culture.
It is true that the whole idea is that premium content vendors (NOT CREATORS) will have to pay for the bandwidth they use to deliver their products. For instance: with your LTE subscription, you get 10 GB of LTE, after that it's throttled. With this legislative innovation, when you pay for a content service, for instance Google All Access, the data volume that you use for that service, will not be counted for your 10 GB LTE limit, but Google will have to pay possible extra costs of high bandwidth volume. Same for VOD services. And that's quite fair, it will make the industry pay for bandwidth upgrades of the net, NOT the taxpayers, and NOT the customers, and NOT the content creators.
Yea you are right , and that's what I was thinking , the content creators shouldn't pay for the bandwith given that I already pay for it , if I pay for 20Mb/s connection and use it 24/24 just to watch youtube I don't see the problem , it's already paid for and it just happens that I take full use of it , if they can't provide the contract promissed speed to all of their customers if they fully take advantage of it then maybe they should just lower the contract promissed speed and monthly cost or develop better infrastructure. If I want to be 100% sure that my internet calls always work flawlessly then it's only right that I would chose a premium service that enables me to do that but not making content creators bid for the allocated bandwidth to each and every one of them .
Depending on the EU country is the signal word here. I was talking about the Austrian legal situation, which differs quite dramatically from the German one (let alone the completely wrong decision of the BGH back in 2010). In Austria as an ISP (may it be commercial or non-profit), you'll never be held responsible under Sec 13 E-Commerce-Act (http://tinyurl.com/neqpljs) for any damages. The statute actually goes much further stating explicitely that the provider of such services has no obligation to monitor the traffic for illegal activities. All that can happen to you (commercial and non-profit provider) is that you might be forced to stop illegal activities once you're aware of them and that is exactly what the whole kino.to-case was about. Sec 81 Copyright Act provides exactly such a provision and the Supreme Court asked the ECJ if such blocking is in line with EU law. It was also not settled before, otherwise the SC would have never asked the ECJ about his opinion. If he would still have done so, the ECJ would just have responded with "not prejudicially, come again". Anyway I was merely mentioning the decision to state that providers can be forced to block content under EU law and that was the whole reason why the ECJ was asked for a preliminary ruling. I guess you're mixing up two completely cases here. The one about the owners of kino.to in Germany and the other case of the Austrian ISP, that refused to block access. Latter didn't have to pay any damages whatsoever.
Technically you're right about the ECJ, it does not create law as such, factually you couldn't be more wrong though. The whole current EU law system is basically a creation of its binding case law (in stark contrast to most national Supreme Courts who cannot legally bind lower courts), which also dramatically changed every single national jurisprudence and over the course of time, the ECJ has gradually taken away more and more competences of national courts.