UK May Kill the EU's Net Neutrality Law

An anonymous reader writes "The U.K. government is planning on vetoing the E.U. legislation that enforces net neutrality under the guise of 'won't anyone think of the child pornography blocking?' again. From the article: ' It’s a surprising turn of events. Just last month, the European Parliament voted to place the principles of net neutrality into law. However, before it becomes law throughout Europe, each member country must also pass the legislation. On Thursday, the British government indicated it may veto it instead. At issue is a new provision that critics argue would restrict the British government’s “ability to block illegal material.” The amendment made it so that only a court order would allow for the banning of content, and not a legislative provision, as originally proposed, according to RT. “We do not support any proposals that mean we cannot enforce our laws, including blocking child abuse images,” a government spokesperson told BuzzFeed.'"

Comments

Good

[Anonymous Coward]

We don't need net neutrality laws in the UK. We have real competition, everyone has the choice of hundreds of different ISPs.

Re:Good

[Anne Thwacks]

The price may be regulated, but the qualitiy of service appears not to be. Service quality is diabiolical - I mean service in the meaning of "what happens whyen you call to report a fault". They threaten to bill you a massive call out charge if the fault is "your responisibility" and frequently clear the fault and then claim "no fault found" - often when said fault is that they reconfigured the exchange without informing you.

They refuse to give technical answers to technical questions even in the (unlikely) event that they can understand expressions like "static IP" and "DNS lookup" they persist in attempting to use dumbed down expressions to avoid using technical terms - thus ensuring that their words do not ahve any useful meaning.

In short, if they were not a monopoly, they would not last a week.

Disclaimer: I had a broadband problem last week - reported it - NFF, but problem gone. Repeatedly threatened with GBP220 call out charge. Process took three hours.

Re:Good

[Alain Williams]

Many of those ISPs are just reselling BT bandwidth. If BT throttles certain sites all these will be effected.

BT do not resell bandwidth to the Internet, it operates a packet switching network over ATM that connects you to your ISP. You ISP connects you to the Internet and might filter or throttle some sites. BT does not look inside the ATM packets that travel over its network and so does not throttle some traffic - in theory anyway.

BT also operates as an ISP which is probably where the confusion lies.

Re:Good

[Charliemopps]

My problem is that BT owns the copper line going to my house, and it is broken. It only works for voice, ADSL2 can barely scape 5Mb/sec with constant drop-outs. BT don't care, they only guarantee that the line works for voice.

In other words I have only one ISP available to me: Virgin. I am tempted to try BT Infinity since apparently they replace most of the wiring, but only if I can cancel it within a month if it proves unusable.

So, I work in the industry... but in the US. So I'm not positive how your field techs do things but I can give you the advice I'd give here.

A lot of times, it's hard for the tech to know what's up. You complain about drop-outs and slow speeds. The Tech shows up, and it tests good. Techs like to fix stuff, that's why they're in the industry. So saying they don't care likely isn't accurate. But DSL issues can be incredibly difficult to diagnose and a lot of consumers use services that are garbage and then blame it on their DSL. So they have to deal with a lot of bogus issues and likely think you're another one.

If I were you, I'd get a notebook and keep a log of when the line stops working, and what is going on when that happens. The classic example is what we here call a "Wet line" You have older twisted pair that works well when dry, but the insulation has cracked and when it rains water literally gets into the insulation and causes the inductance of the wire to change. It's not a strait short, if it were the card would fail or error. But the change in inductance will make the signal flutter all over the place. Generally this problem comes and goes with the rain. It takes a while for the water to seep in so it usually starts a few hours after the rain starts and then it takes a while for the line to dry out, so it will last a while after the rain stops. This makes it very hard for the customer to make the connection in their head. If you figure out that your outages are in fact related to the rain, then your next step is to convince the techs. Now you could just flat out say that... but your best bet is to get the tech out WHILE its raining. Even if he's a complete tool, if he plugs in his test set and it fails, he's going to have to do something about it. So figure out when it's going to rain for a few days strait and then call your trouble ticket in. Therefor increasing the likelyhood of a failure when they test.

There are plenty of other issues that are similar. So if its not the rain, just keep track. Does it happen every friday at 8pm? Maybe your DSA is congested. Is it only in the mornings? Only when its bellow freezing? etc... all this will help them diagnose the problem. Try to predict when the problem will happen based on the data you collected, then try to get the tech there when you suspect it will. If you can, schedule an appointment and show the tech your data. If you can't schedule an appointment, write the tech a letter and leave it hanging on your NID (where your telephone line enters your house)

Make it nice and friendly. Over here, I've literally seen AT&T techs install 10k foot spools of wire between a customers card and their house out of spite. So ticking off the tech is not a good idea.

what makes illegal things illegal

[marcello_dl]

Is a blockage going to help the ultimate objective, that is to stop crime? Does it not drive criminals underground in many cases?
Oh wait, stopping crime is not the ultimate objective, control of communication is. Go ahead.

Re:what makes illegal things illegal

[geniice]

You are ignoring the history. The internet watch foundation (IWF)started off as an attempt to target child abuse hosted in the UK. Not even a government action. It was the police that made it clear to a group of ISPs that they would do something if child abuse image weren't removed from certain UK servers. Thus ISPs set of the IWF was set up to handle reports and forward them for take-down.

The UK's filtering system has an even odder history. Neither the government nor the police asked for it. BT decided to develop the system (cleanfeed) pretty much of their own imitative then pressure the other ISPs into setting up something similar.

None of this was sold as protecting children since it was never sold. Until the IWF blocked an image on wikipedia public awareness of their activities was pretty much nill.

Re:what makes illegal things illegal

[Anonymous Coward]

Many countries need to do a 180 on censorship laws or anything considered "regulation" of internet content because "no blocking of legal content" is the same as "block all torrents, porn and questionable photoshops"

I think that is the wrong way to think about it.
If you really want to stop censorship you have to teach people that censorship isn't about preventing some people from speaking their opinion, it is about preventing you from hearing it.
Everyone is free to say what they want, as long as no-one is there to hear it.

When people realize that censorship exists, not to stop the nutjobs from having their ideas, but because you can't be trusted to select what thoughts to accept and what to reject we might see people thinking of censorship as something bad.

Censorship is as close as we get to thought control with current technology.

Re:what makes illegal things illegal

[currently_awake]

The way to stop child porn isn't censorship, it's to follow the smut back to its source and arrest the perverts. Anything else is just hiding the problem.

Why are they in the EU again?

[prefec2]

The British government does not want anything which has to do with the EU, especially when it comes to human rights. Lately, they opposed the European human rights declaration. Now that! They do not want to tax their financial sector, so they can pay back all the money the states had to spend to stabilize the economy. If they really do not want to be in the EU. Then fuck off and leave. If the only interest is a trade union. We can negotiate one. But please do not hold back the other nations. Thanks.

Re:Why are they in the EU again?

[Anonymous Coward]

The UK contributes more to the EU then it gets back in rebates and grants combined, so you're "they like receiving money" claim is nonsense.

Re:Why are they in the EU again?

[jonwil]

Its not just human rights, the UK have strongly resisted joining Schengen migration laws and allowing free movement of people and goods between the UK and other EU countries.

I think the other EU countries need to start getting together and saying to the UK that they need to either adopt ALL of the EU rules (including the Euro, Schengen, Net Neutrality, human rights etc etc) or get out of the EU completly and fend for themselves.

But the UK will never adopt things like Schengen because it would remove customs and import checks at UK borders (including airports, seaports and the Channel Tunnel crossings) and make it almost impossible to stop the flow of cheap booze, cheap fags, illegal immigrants and all the other stuff you see on those "UK border agency" TV shows from comming into the country.

Re:Why are they in the EU again?

[Anonymous Coward]

The UK contributes more to the EU then it gets back in rebates and grants combined, so you're "they like receiving money" claim is nonsense.

The amount of trade the UK does with the EU outweighs any deficit in rebates and grants they get. If you want to leave the EU over rebates and grants you'd be sacrificing a pound to save a penny. The UK may whine on endlessly about leaving the EU but the extent of their trade with the common market makes that an impractical idea to say the least.

Re:Why are they in the EU again?

[Anne Thwacks]

The main disadvantage of joining the Euro is that it is much harder for the politicians to cook the books. The Germans have a particular detestation of cooked books, since they nearly starved to death as a consequence of a particularly bad episode. The Greeks (amongst others) are currently discovering that cooking the books results in a diet of cooked books, and its not very tasty. However, they have not yet realised that "it was the cook wot done it".

You appear to have had a bit too much Kool-ade.

Re:UK EU more problems than solutions?

[91degrees]

Are there any benefits that a random British person could point out, that are the result of UK being in the EU?

Cheaper cars (EU rules ban charging extra for right hand drive), and I've been able to live and work in Germany, North Holland and Belgium. Also, electrical goods come with a plug already fitted, and I can head across the channel for cheap drinks.

Re:UK EU more problems than solutions?

[Anonymous Coward]

EU laws limit, to some extent, the damage the British government can do.
Plus, I get to move around within Europe without worrying about work permits.

Re:Good, time to kill net neutrality.

[Jahta]

Net neutrality proposals needs to die and quickly.

You may have intended this as sarcasm. If not, I'd suggest you haven't fully understood the problem.

Look at the current UK government's record, for example. First they introduced mandatory "porn" filtering - which you must formally opt-out of - in the name of "saving the children"; of course, even in it's first incarnation, it was blocking things that were clearly not porn.

Then they swiftly moved to "leverage" that to block "extremist" material. The problem, of course, is that extremist is a nebulous term; UK politicians have described groups as diverse as the Countryside Alliance and UK Uncut (a tax pressure group) as "extremist", and it's these same politicians - not the courts - who are deciding what should be blocked.

Maybe you really do want to live in an internet bubble where the only things you see are whatever the government of the day has decided is "safe". But most of us would rather make our own minds up.