European Parliament Votes For Net Neutrality, Forbids Mobile Roaming Costs

First time accepted submitter TBerben (1061176) writes "The European Parliament has voted to accept the telecommunications reform bill. This bill simultaneously forbids mobile providers from charging roaming costs as of December 15, 2015 and guarantees net neutrality. Previous versions of the bill contained a much weaker definition of net neutrality, offering exemptions for 'specialized services,' but this was superseded in an amendment (original link, in Dutch) submitted by Dutch MEP Marietje Schaake (liberal fraction). Note that the legislation is not yet definitive: the Council of Ministers still has the deciding vote, but they are expected to follow the EP's vote."

Comments

Re:Good, I guess

[Chelloveck]

Then think about it reverse situation. I'm Amazon. We've been having a hard time getting traction for our streaming service; that lousy Netflix has the market locked up. We have all the bandwidth we need, so paying the ISP for more won't help. I know! We'll pay them to throttle Netflix's bandwidth!

Or, I'm Comcast. We own NBC, and their ratings suck rocks. So we'll give preferential treatment for subscribers who stream our properties, and throttle the speed of properties we don't own. And if people really want to watch other content we can charge them extra to remove the throttling. Call it the "Special SpeedBoost Streaming Package" and charge our subscribers $10/month extra for it.

Or, I'm Sony. Let's slip Comcast a little to make sure that PSN games have a higher network priority than XBone games. Et voila! See how much faster and smoother PlayStation is compared to XBox!