If you look at the fine print in the published "Guidelines for implementing Net Neutratily" [1] linked in the article you will see that there are 3 exceptions to the rule (a,b,c). Being "c" the one that should fear us most:
EXCEPTIONS
a) "comply with Union legislative acts (...)
-> meaning that a court order can change Net Neutrality, hmmm ok.
b) preserve the integrity and security of the network, of services provided via that network, and of the terminal equipment of end-users;
-> meaning that in order to guarantee the security of the network Net Neutrality may be avoided. I'm so-so on this one.
c) prevent impending network congestion and mitigate the effects of exceptional or temporary network congestion, provided that equivalent categories of traffic are treated equally.
-> Meaning that ISPs can throttle specific categories of traffic at their own will.
This last one ruins the whole law. And this is not what me as European wanted. ISPs won :(
Well for one, torrent's not a video format. Let alone a streaming video service.
And anyhow, FCC did exactly that; they went after Comcast for throttling torrents for no reason. And throttling torrents just because they're torrents is clearly not permissable by this clause by BEREC either; all it allows for is temporary and exceptional traffic shaping in case of congestion, provided it's done nondiscriminatorily. Which is a good thing; an ISP needs to have a neutral course of action available then besides a meltdown of its net. And yeah, I'd say latency insensitive bulk downloads would be perfectly sensible to deprioritize then. Now, doing what's reserved for recovery in general instead is certainly an abuse of network neutrality, by this rulebook as by FCCs.
It's not the same category, but it IS a competing service playing on an unfair playing field.
Leveling the playing field for people playing the same game is all fine and dandy, but it completely fucks over disruptive innovations challenging the status quo in a different category.
How about this one, people watch less TV than they did ten years ago, a lot of that time is now spent using Facebook, what happens when Facebook isn't throttled but Netflix and the rest in their category are?
> It's not the same category, but it IS a competing service playing on an unfair playing field.
It really isn't. Netflix isn't a protocol, and if you're using torrents as a drop in replacement for Netflix you're breaking copyright law in any case. You can't argue that you use torrents as a competing service without implying you're breaking the law.
That's kind of irrelevant. I was simply using torrents as an example.
The problem with the category thing is that it makes your passtime more important than my passtime. And suddenly the passtime that pays the most is going to get preferential treatment.
This hurts innovation and companies that want to disrupt current services with a different verticle.
Category based throttling sounds like a good idea but it simply is not neutral and will fail us.
copyright law is in fact harmonized on EU level, by the EU copyright directive. Not that it could be substantially different already by Berne convention on a global level.
hmm, wiki mentiones that private copies are actually usually allowed in the EU, with the exception of the UK, and a regular reason given for blank media levies many countries have. But that's rather different from online distribution of one's copies.
I think they have some notion of "commercial scale" filesharing to prosecute things like pirate bay, not sure how that works legally. But that too is a different matter, as they don't even share any copies of anything, just metadata, and lately not even that, but merely links.
The real question is whether any of this has any relevance for "pirated" media streaming or downloading being actually legal; not tolerated or thought too minor to warrant the privacy violation of revealing the person behind the IP or any loophole like that, but actually legal.
However, choosing to throttle video content in general to promote their cable service would probably be allowed under this ruling. I don't know if that possibility is serious enough to worry about though.
I wonder even about that, given that it's stated that it can be done only under exceptional and temporary conditions of congestion. The regulator should probably act if it were the general practice instead.
But yeah, the public will need to stay vigilant over how national regulators implement this ruling case by case.
From my understanding it looks more like:
"We are streaming the Olympics and its transferring 2TB/s of data, we need to route this differently!". But then again, loopholes are loopholes, and it will be just a matter of time until it will be abused.
Sry, could you clarify, what looks more like rerouting a large download?? Anyhow, allowing traffic shaping in congestion control is not a network neutrality loophole in itself, but ofc any regulation depends on the regulator.
If you are talking about the case from 5ish years ago, that was because the court struck down the entire basis for net neutrality. The net neutrality rules themselves didn't allow for blocking p2p.
yeah, that's the case. Could you clarify? I'm just seeing old articles claiming the last court verdict on the matter was that the FCC overstepped its authority in that particular case? Did some case or law change this? But yeah, hard to see how discriminating a particular protocol w/o cause could be network neutral.
Sure. There was a new FCC ruling that based it's decision on a much more legally sound law.
The FCC is allowed to regulate telecommunication services strictly. Right now it takes a sort of a hands off approach, but they have broad authority to make rules. Before 2015, the FCC considered ISPs to be "information services" instead of "telecommunication services." So the first time the FCC proposed net neutrality rules, it tried to apply them under the "information services" framework.
The Court in 2010 (I think) found that the FCC didn't have the power to regulate "information services" so harshly. So the court canceled their net neutrality rules.
So last year the FCC reclassified ISPs as telecommunication services. Since they are allowed to harshly regulate those services, it's considered very likely to upheld by the court this time.
The only chance it gets struck down is if the court thinks the FCC was clearly wrong about ISPs being a telecommunication service. But the law is pretty clear that are. But I think some ISPs are still fighting it.
A legislative act is not an act of the court - that'd be a judicial act - but of the parliament ie a law; that's the legislative body. Ofc a regulation needs to comply with laws; how else is a legal state supposed to work? And afaik traffic shaping done in a content-neutral way is network neutral; for it favors no particular provider. "Provided that equivalent categories of traffic are treated equally" is quite limiting.
I don't think "of exceptional or temporary network congestion..." means "at will".
Recital 15, attached to the article 3(3)c, goes to great length defining what exceptional means, that such traffic may be managed, temporarily, only if it was unpredictable, unavoidable, and short duration, or it damages network reactivity. It clearly states that such management is not a replacement for upgrading bandwidth, both mobile and fixed. And even then they cannot prejudice specific traffic, just an entire class of it, again, only temporarily.
Here is some more text, from directly below what you pasted.
Recital 15
==========
Third, measures going beyond such reasonable traffic management
measures might also be necessary to prevent impending network
congestion, that is, situations where congestion is about to
materialise, and to mitigate the effects of network congestion, where
such congestion occurs only temporarily or in exceptional
circumstances. The principle of proportionality requires that traffic
management measures based on that exception treat equivalent
categories of traffic equally. Temporary congestion should be
understood as referring to specific situations of short duration,
where a sudden increase in the number of users in addition to the
regular users, or a sudden increase in demand for specific content,
applications or services, may overflow the transmission capacity of
some elements of the network and make the rest of the network less
reactive. Temporary congestion might occur especially in mobile
networks, which are subject to more variable conditions, such as
physical obstructions, lower indoor coverage, or a variable number of
active users with changing location. While it may be predictable that
such temporary congestion might occur from time to time at certain
points in the network – such that it cannot be regarded as exceptional
– it might not recur so often or for such extensive periods that a
capacity expansion would be economically justified. Exceptional
congestion should be understood as referring to unpredictable and
unavoidable situations of congestion, both in mobile and fixed
networks. Possible causes of those situations include a technical
failure such as a service outage due to broken cables or other
infrastructure elements, unexpected changes in routing of traffic or
large increases in network traffic due to emergency or other
situations beyond the control of providers of internet access
services. Such congestion problems are likely to be infrequent but may
be severe, and are not necessarily of short duration. The need to
apply traffic management measures going beyond the reasonable traffic
management measures in order to prevent or mitigate the effects of
temporary or exceptional network congestion should not give providers
of internet access services the possibility to circumvent the general
prohibition on blocking, slowing down, altering, restricting,
interfering with, degrading or discriminating between specific
content, applications or services, or specific categories
thereof. Recurrent and more long-lasting network congestion which is
neither exceptional nor temporary should not benefit from that
exception but should rather be tackled through expansion of network
capacity.
Congestion control and QoS are crucial parts necessary for network reliability and the functioning of low latency services though. How would one even formulate a law that doesn't have loopholes w.r.t. to those?
Core networks do not use QoS or congestion control in the traditional sense, as they are designed to be run without congestion in normal circumstances and because QoS is too expensive compared to adding more capacity.
If you look at the fine print in the published "Guidelines for implementing Net Neutratily" [1] linked in the article you will see that there are 3 exceptions to the rule (a,b,c). Being "c" the one that should fear us most:
EXCEPTIONS
-> meaning that a court order can change Net Neutrality, hmmm ok. -> meaning that in order to guarantee the security of the network Net Neutrality may be avoided. I'm so-so on this one. -> Meaning that ISPs can throttle specific categories of traffic at their own will.This last one ruins the whole law. And this is not what me as European wanted. ISPs won :(
[1] http://berec.europa.eu/eng/document_register/subject_matter/...
[EDIT] typos