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Network Neutrality Is Law In Chile

Posted by timothy on from the muy-bien-tal-vez dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Chile is the first country of the world to guarantee by law the principle of network neutrality, according to the Teleccomunications Market Comission's Blog from Spain. The official newspaper of the Chilean Republic published yesterday a Law that guarantees that any Internet user will be able to use, send, receive or offer any content, applications or legal services over the Internet, without arbitrary or discriminatory blocking."

6 of 180 comments (clear)

  1. Chile by MarkRose · · Score: 5, Funny

    That makes sense. When I eat chile, I never have trouble with traffic flow or port blocking.

    --
    Be relentless!
  2. If Chile can do it, why can't we do it? by LinearBob · · Score: 5, Insightful

    In one word -- GREED!

    --
    An analog gray hair frantically clinging to the trailing edge of technology. :-)
    1. Re:If Chile can do it, why can't we do it? by MarkRose · · Score: 5, Informative

      Greed and monopoly. If competitors were permitted in cities, I bet you'd see a return to unrestricted access. Where I have my hosting, I get transfer for under $0.01/GB. A TB of transfer is less than $10. Bandwidth is no longer a major cost of doing the ISP business. So why can't I get that at home? Lack of competition. Cities get fat checks for restricting competition, and we all pay for it.

      --
      Be relentless!
  3. Re:A Law That Guarantees by LiquidPaper · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Well, yes. We are part of America. I believe you are thinking of USA.

  4. Re:"applications or legal services over the Intern by sjames · · Score: 5, Informative

    All this to solve a problem that doesn't even exist. The only time we saw torrent throttling (not even blocking!!) in the U.S. was Comcast, and they got smacked down for it. The market worked, why do we need regulation when there is no problem?

    REALLY?

    You seem to forgotten that there was a lot of complaining and a lot of people finding no competition to turn to and then the FCC smacked Comcast for throttling torrents.

    In other words, exactly the opposite of what you said.

  5. Re:The argument for net neutrality by Alexandra+Erenhart · · Score: 5, Informative

    The entity in charge of regulating this is probably the SUBTEL,(Subsecretaría de Telecomunicaciones, subsecretary of telecommunications perhaps is the translation?). I don't know if you have any idea about politics in Chile, but we have several political parties over there, not only two. Yeah, there are like 3 or 4 that are bigger and with more power than the others, but they don't get to bend government entities the same way political parties in the US do. So in a way, by being more political (more parties), they are less political (the power is more spread). I don't know if that makes sense, but it sounds pretty haha.

    Chile doesn't have states like the US. The main divisions are regions. They have their own governmental entities but they're all controlled by the central ones in Santiago, the capital. So regions don't get to do whatever they want either, meaning that if the government creates a law, all the rest of the regions have to follow, and individual regions can't make their own laws.

    I hope that helped somewhat to understand a bit how Chile works. Of course, the real question is if the SUBTEL is going to care enough to reinforce the law in all its extent. That's a completely different deal.