The European Parliament has killed net neutrality
The EU’s proposals on internet access, approved yesterday by the European Parliament, is very bad news for Europeans. In the first place, it shows that our parliament doesn’t legislate on behalf of the people who vote it into power, but instead on the basis of what business lobbies dictate, in this case, the telecommunications industry, which has always put profit above everything else.
The vote means that Europe will not benefit from innovation, because it will make no sense for entrepreneurs to launch new products and services on a playing field is skewed in favor of the telecommunications companies, allowing them to create internet fast lanes for those who pay to have their content load more rapidly by calling them specialized services, exempt applications from users’ monthly bandwidth cap (zero-rating), define classes of services (and discriminate by speeding up or slowing down traffic in those classes) and also to slow down traffic to prevent impending congestion. In short, the very opposite of a competitive environment, and one that will stifle any initiatives that depend on telecommunications, which is to say just about any.
The telecoms lobby has taken a strategic approach, conceding ground on watered-down roaming legislation (which won’t come into effect until 2017 and was already discounted). In return, the main operators have been given carte blanche to do what they like with the internet. There will be no EU controls and no oversight, with each member state’s regulator left to decide if companies have overstepped the mark, which they will.
Yet EU parliamentarians congratulated themselves yesterday for “protecting net neutrality”, when in fact what they had done was to systematically overrule any amendment that might have protected us from our rapacious telecoms companies. Within a couple of years, we will wake up to discover that innovation and new tech companies are mysteriously absent from Europe, and we’ll ask why: and the answer will be because of what a bunch of deputies voted through yesterday. While the US administration is protecting internet neutrality through clear and robust legislation, Europe is sucking up to the telecoms companies, giving away any hope of innovation to guarantee their profits.
With the help of the European Parliament, Europe’s telecoms companies are now free to do as they please, stifling innovation in their own interests.
If you hear some European politician talking about “the protection that Brussels has provided for net neutrality” don’t believe a word of it, and what’s more, remove that politician from your list of honest brokers. Within a few years, all innovation will be taking place on the other side of the Atlantic, rather than in Europe. Now you know why.
(En español, aquí)
