A while back, we had net neutrality incorporated into the law here in the Netherlands. Unfortunately, it seems EU commissioner Nellie Kroes seems to think net neutrality is a bad idea. Either that, or she is completely retarded. In her role as commissioner for digital affairs, she has proposed that telcos should be able to treat certain services with preference over services offered by other parties. In her view, this would not violate the concept of net neutrality
this is complete bullshit of course, because if you don’t treat all traffic as equal, the whole concept of net neutrality goes out of the window.
However, it might be more interesting to think about the abhorrent consequences of this kind of reasoning. the problems are threefold:
1. it limits our freedom to choose by putting a premium on usingĀ services that compete with those of your telco.
2. it stifles the market for services, in contrary to what our foolish EU commissioner thinks. This is largely because if preferred services coat less, they create an uneven playing field for newcomers by raising the costs for consumers.
3. it essentially limits our freedom of speech. If there’s a premium on using services, you could essentially raise the price of using those services to beyond what is reasonable and though that mechanism make them unviable. In the end, these limits can curtial the use of those services as a platform of free speech.
Besides these objections, the question remains as to who put Kroes up to this, and why.
Given that this proposal hugely benefits the telcos, I think it is safe to say that the telcos have had a (gigantic) influence on the contents of this proposal.
It seems that the telcos are doing the because they want to create extra revenue. It is understandable, but I think it is completely ridiculous. Somehow the telcos see themselves as more than providers of the connection service. It is about time that they learned their place in the world: they are nothing more than movers of the bits that make up our communications. Leave the services to the people that agree good at it: the people who create the Spotify’s, the Skype’s and the Diaspora’s of this world. Telcos somehow want to control what we do with our connections, while this isn’t their job beyond making sure that they can guarantee a good connection. They already make huge profits on every megabyte that they charge. It’s ridiculous!