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Netherlands Cements Net Neutrality In Law
Fluffeh writes "A while back, Dutch Telcos started to sing the 'We are losing money due to internet services!' song and floated new plans that would make consumers pay extra for data used by apps that conflicted with their own services — apps like Skype, for example. The politicians stepped in, however, and wrote laws forbidding this. Now, the legislation has finally passed through the Senate and the Netherlands is an officially Net Neutral country, the second in the world — Chile did this a while back."
Our internet is half their speed, and I'm guessing that we have, proportionally, less than half the options for internet providers that they do.
Someone remind me of the specifics of when we gave telecos a bunch of taxpayer money to speed up our internet, and they, naturally, gave it to their CEOs and investors, and are now complaining they don't have the infrastructure to not throttle and cap and can't possibly afford to upgrade?
The dutch probably didn't do that. Just a wild guess.
I don't see how blocking TPB is not related to net neutrality. Net neutrality can be boiled down to "treat all package the same", which includes packages to and from TPB. The mechanism of package discrimination are different (pay us more or we won't allow this package to come through vs. we won't allow this package to come thorugh), but they are both examples of package discrimination, and thus breaks net neutrality (as I see it, at least). Of course, there is an immense differnce between an ISP deciding to do it themselves versus an ISP being ordered by a court, so they aren't equivalent in all respects.
The religious nutjobs, I have no idea how they fits in.