Today is a sad day in the history of freedom. Today, the European Parliament approved a proposal which mandates a form of net neutrality which in fact is everything but that.

Telecom companies have won a major battle to charge extra for basically nothing extra delivered on their part. The carrot which was dangled in from of member nations was the abolishment of roaming charges. But through lobbying and cartel-like practices the telco’s have banded together to strike it rich.

Because the prices of international calls have already been regulated, the actual loss of profits on international calls and data already is lower than it used to be. On top of that, roaming hasn’t exactly been abolished. It has been abolished only for calls and for the phenominally small amount of data of 5 MiB. That would equate roughly to opening the front page and 2 articles of your average news site. In exchange for that, the EP accepted a very weak definition of net neutrality which is full of loopholes which encourage preferential treatment. It will be allowed to allow free products while charging competitors for access to networks. It will be allowed to prioritize traffic based on what type the traffic is and it will be left to the companies themselves to actually come up with these categories, meaning that they can effectively ban the services they don’t like. There’s nothing neutral about this kind of net neutrality at all.

The impact on startups whom need to compete with the likes of facebook, Apple and Google is that the big companies can pay their way to dominance. It also allows telco’s to enact favouritism without peril. It’s bad news for powerusers as well, as they are now much more likely to be victims of various bans on applications and ways of using their connections. Should I be punished for actually using my connection because of the 90% op people who don’t use theirs?

In short, it is very bad news for freedom and innovation.

Should I move to the US instead?