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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.
Who cares if you offer a much faster speed for more money as long as everything else is on the same footing?
What people REALLY worry about are some services being *slowed*. Mind you, net neutrality doesn't address that really - but that's actually what people want when they claim they want Net Neutrally. The extra rules will herm no-one and allow for extra services people will enjoy.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I have been running this regex on the whole internet since it's inception and it has never matched anything .* rules, succeeds in closing all loopholes"
".* passes
Tourists in the EU get a better deal. The EU telcos get a better deal in their Asian, African and South American markets/former colonies. :) Free speech on any news topic results in account issues and a visit by local government officials for a chat down.
Better to keep the markets captive than than have nations explore other cheaper telco methods or build their own networks.
The real local test will be p2p use and new expensive upload plans. Download is fine on the slow lanes, dare to upload and a new expensive plan is suggested and needed.
The "zero rating" agreements will push users to a select list of walled social media sites. Comments and votes can then be shaped, removed, reported, logged, tracked by govs/mil. On average a nations images, vids, text, comments be directed to a few easy to track social media sites due to zero rating freedoms
Also very difficult for new brands to get that now needed zero rating to attract users.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
The upload bandwidth for a cellphone is small compared to download. It's a physical limitation, more spectrum is allocated the downstream link.
the possibility to give some services the facebook 'zero' treatment is actually a really fucking minor problem when you can buy unlimited internet for under 10 bucks that does not have a strict cap to count against(and if you can buy that sim from another country then yeehaw).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
These posts are a lot funnier if you just assume the poster is black.
Seeing as we're off topic... I'd not say the problem is "niggers" (of which I'm partially one - if you're using the black African as the definition) but the problem is poverty, corruption, abuse from the wealthy, and generally people. I don't actually think the problem is, as you so eloquently put it, niggers. I think the problem is people - that's the pattern I'm seeing as well as the other metrics.
As an aside: Spell check is racist! It gives me the red squiggly line of defeat when I type Obama but it has nary a problem when I type nigger.
As another interesting aside, well, interesting to me... My black heritage comes from the black people who fought on the side of the Brits during the Revolution. After the war they insisted they be allowed to take the blacks with them because they'd promised them freedom and the King's promise was kind of, sort of, important at that time. They first went to Haiti but that was short term. They were then shipped to Nova Scotia. That's where my Micmac comes from as they were all encouraged to rut like rabbits. Then, my great grandmother (a Hawksworth/Turner) moved to Massachusetts and married her a mixed race person. This led to my father who was quite a mutt by that point who married my Irish mother. This was quite a stink during those days. Especially since my mother was a Prescott. (Yes, same family.) Anyhow, those two fine, upstanding, people built me out of spare parts.
I mean, well, if we're going to go off-topic about race we might as well go all the way.
I say that to mention, again, that I'm pretty open and curious about racial differences be they cultural or natural. I've given this some thought - I've even used some of that stuff they call logic (newfangled stuff, you might not have heard of it) and I've pretty much concluded that people suck regardless of skin color. They only get worse when you throw in a lack of education, financial growth, abuse, and mistreatment. Imagine that?
See, you probably weren't expecting a semi-serious reply. However, there you have it. Yes, yes I do need sleep. When the questionnaire asks what my race is, as some are wont to do, I select the "other" option and write in "human."
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
The problem is exactly that it will no longer be unlimited internet. What good is an infinite data plan if the speed gets throttled to a few bits per hour?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
because frankly, what private citizen will need a lot of international calls
This has come about, partly, because some people were incurring huge roaming charges without even going abroad.
For example, in some parts of the south coast of England it's possible (sometimes even likely) that you'll get a much better mobile signal from France than from the UK.
People had to have two sims - and remember to put the French one in when at home and the English one in when they went to town.
Then, a mobile operator would put up a new mast in the UK - some people who used to get a French signal now got that new mast instead. And so now they were using their French sim which used to avoid roaming charges and got roaming charges.
I presume similar happens (probably even more commonly) on any of the other international borders in Europe but it was the problems for people on the south coast that I've seen reported on in the past.
I also suspect that the fact that if you are "in the know" you can roam cheaply - just buy a cheap sim in each country you visit - also influenced the lawmakers. And the fact that consumers were able to run up HUGE bills without realizing, tens of thousands of pounds in some cases. In the EU, in business to consumer contracts, it's generally supposed that the business will do everything in their power to ensure that the consumer gets what they (reasonably) expect and "catching out" consumers is not looked upon favourably even if a contract apparently allows it.
God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = -@B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t," and there was light.
I'm really looking forward to being able to use foreign SIMs in my home country without penalty. It should make the spy's jobs a little harder, having to go after foreign service providers to grab the data they expect to be handed by cooperative businesses in their own countries. I'm sure they will get it, but it's still just one extra step, a little extra cost for them.
Also, some EU countries don't have such horrific data retention laws as the UK, so there's another bonus.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC