Europe's 'Net Neutrality' Could Allow Throttling of Torrents and VPNs (torrentfreak.com)

An anonymous reader writes: TorrentFreak reports that the European Parliament is approaching a vote on new telecom regulations that aim to implement net neutrality throughout EU member states. Unfortunately, the legislation hinges on a few key amendments, and experts are warning about the consequences should those amendments fail to pass. "These amendments will ensure that specific types of traffic aren't throttled around the clock, for example. The current language would allow ISPs to throttle BitTorrent traffic permanently if that would optimize overall 'transmission quality.' This is not a far-fetched argument, since torrent traffic can be quite demanding on a network." That's not the only concern: "Besides file-sharing traffic the proposed legislation also allows Internet providers to interfere with encrypted traffic, including VPN connections. Since encrypted traffic can't be classified though deep packet inspection, ISPs may choose to de-prioritize it altogether."

Comments

Re:Hows is this a net neutrality bill?

[serviscope_minor]

I though net neutrality is frequently confused with QoS.

Throttling all VPNs is net neutrality. Throttling all VPNs except those provided by the ISP isn't. Net neutrality is about being neutral as to the source/destination/provider, not the protocol. It's to stop the ISPs abusing their service provider positions to make their versions of services better than everyone else's by artificially damaging other people's.

Don't get me wrong, it's still crappy, but I always thought the point of network neutrality was to level the playing field for service providers, not protocols.