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EU Commissioner: I Will End Net Neutrality Waiting Game
An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from ZDNet:
"Europeans are a step closer to seeing new net neutrality rules put in place, after the release of an EU regulators' report on how often ISPs and operators throttle their services. On Tuesday, digital agenda commissioner Neelie Kroes said the release of the report from by the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC) means she will make recommendations to the EU on preserving net neutrality, which aims to make sure ISPs do not unfairly restrict customers from accessing the service or application or their choice. 'BEREC has today provided the data I was waiting for (PDF). For most Europeans, their internet access works well most of the time. But these findings show the need for more regulatory certainty and that there are enough problems to warrant strong and targeted action to safeguard consumers,' Kroes said in a statement. 'Given that BEREC's findings highlight a problem of effective consumer choice, I will prepare recommendations to generate more real choices and end the net neutrality waiting game in Europe,' she added."
Net Neutrality is not really anything to do with censorship, it's about ensuring that - for example - Google doesn't pay your ISP to prioritise all Google.com traffic over other search engines or that BSkyB doesn't pay them to cripple access to the BBC News site while leaving Sky News untouched.
I'm not in favour of censorship for any reason, but it's not helpful to conflate it with net neutrality.
I think you're confusing us with America. The US produces almost all the (mass-market) content in the world and, well, Europe is composed of 45 countries. The EU is not a cohesive country either - there's 27 of us. We all have different laws and we're bound together by separate treaties, most of which only include parts of Europe, some which even include non-EU countries. The Euro zone (common currency) is one thing, the Schengen space (freedom of travel) is another one, etc.
It's very very complicated - but we're not a federation and what the bureaucrats do in Brussels is largely their problem. We're hardly ever *forced* to agree - the guy did say "reccomendation". We generally agree on implementing reccomendations when the public supports it. I believe this will be the case with Net Neutrality, and France can go on pretending it's still a major power in the world, and that we all give a damn about what it does.
The vast majority of countries in Europe do not have opressive ISP policies or draconian copyright law enforcement, so the whole net neutrality thing won't even register on our radar.
(I'm not a politician, so I could be wrong on the whole EU thing)