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EU Passes Net Neutrality Rules, Fails To Close Loopholes (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader writes: European MEPs have voted to bring EU-wide net neutrality rules into effect next April. The rules most notably will abolish data roaming charges, a significant problem when country-hopping in Europe. Legislators hail the new rules as a major step forward, but critics point out that several major amendments failed to pass which would have closed serious loopholes in the rules. "Among the exceptions opposed by net neutrality supporters is one which allows providers to offer priority to 'specialized services,' providing they still treat the 'open' internet equally. Many had seen the exception as allowing providers to offer an internet fast lane to paying sites ... A different exception is aimed at situations where the limitation is not speed, but data usage. The EU's regulations allow 'zero rating,' a practice whereby certain sites or applications are not counted against data limits. That gives those sites a specific advantage when dealing with users with strict data caps such as those on mobile internet. Here's the full legislative text.
... The extra rules will herm no-one and allow for extra services people will enjoy.
When does regulation lead to innovation that leads to extra services.
Do you really think it's a coincidence that the internet and then cell phones and then smart phones all appeared in a few short years WITHOUT regulation? And that the only innovation from a century of REGULATED phone service was the replacement of operators with dial phones and then touch-tone phones?
Can you really imagine smart phones developing if cell carriers had been under any net neutrality-like rules? What rule would apply to streaming video? What rule would apply to SMS texts? Since none of those existed, they're be no rule to allow them to be used.
Rules and regulations de facto become barriers to entry into a market, thus protecting incumbents.
It's called regulatory capture:
Regulatory capture is a form of political corruption that occurs when a regulatory agency, created to act in the public interest, instead advances the commercial or political concerns of special interest groups that dominate the industry or sector it is charged with regulating.[1] Regulatory capture is a form of government failure; it creates an opening for firms or political groups to behave in ways injurious to the public (e.g., producing negative externalities). The agencies are called "captured agencies".
Legal scholars have pointed to the possibility that federal agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had been captured by media conglomerates. Peter Schuck of Yale Law School has argued that the FCC is subject to capture by the media industries' leaders and therefore reinforce the operation of corporate cartels in a form of "corporate socialism" that serves to "regressively tax consumers, impoverish small firms, inhibit new entry, stifle innovation, and diminish consumer choice".[35] The FCC selectively granted communications licenses to some radio and television stations in a process that excludes other citizens and little stations from having access to the public.
Yay "net neutrality".
Sorry, the evidence does not support trusting government to solve these kinds of issues.
It just doesn't. All the wishful believing (and it ISN'T "thinking") in the universe isn't going to change that.
In the EU at least one country already had net neutrality: The Netherlands. It was adopted in a few weeks after all major mobile providers decided to ask money based on what service you use instead of data or bandwidth.
The thing is, this legislation overrides ours. Which means we will actually lose net neutrality.
Really bad, because the current law had no loopholes. And no problems, you still get great speeds for very little money, and everyone who wants to create a new service has a guarantee the providers will treat them fairly.
Let's hope the ISPs made themselves so unpopular last time they tried letting people pay extra if they wanted to use facebook or WhatsApp that they will not try again.