EDRi has answered the BEREC Consultation on Net Neutrality that ended on 31 July 2012, underlining that BEREC, the European Commission and national telecom regulators should be acting to stop the Net neutrality breaches and to ensure that services failing to maintain open access to the Internet, should not be able to refer to themselves as Internet access services.

EDRi welcomed BEREC's commitment to provide further guidance on net neutrality in order to maintain an open and competitive internet in Europe and to address the increasingly urgent question of how digital technology can be kept free and open. The answer of the organisation tackled issues in the BEREC's three guidelines on Quality of Service (BoR 32), IP-interconnection (BoR 33) and differentiation practices (BoR 31).

Following the arguments presented, EDRi thinks that BEREC's guidance on net neutrality should be based on the following major six principles:

1.The Internet must be kept and open. Reachability between all end points connected to the Internet, without any form of restriction must be maintained.

2. All forms of discriminatory traffic management, such as blocking or throttling should be prohibited.

3. Traffic management should only be allowed as narrowly tailored deviations from the rule. This must be either technically necessary or to address a transient network management problem which cannot otherwise be addressed.

4. Use of deep packet inspection (and re-use of associated data) should be reviewed by national data protection regulators to assess compliance with the EU's data protection and fundamental rights framework. By default, only header information should be use for traffic management.

5. Accessible, complete information on traffic management practices and justifications must be published.

6. Non-neutral treatment of traffic for “voluntary” law enforcement by intermediaries’ purposes must be prohibited unless there is a legal basis in the country where the restriction is being implemented.

EDRi's response to the NN Consultation (31.07.2012)
http://edri.org/files/2012EDRi_position_BEREC_NetNeutrality.pdf

EDRi-gram: A new Net Neutrality EC consultation delays possible regulations (1.08.2012)
http://edri.org/edrigram/number10.15/another-net-neutrality-consultati...