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Deutsch: EU-Rat: Entwurf des Ratsbeschlusses zur Netzneutralität

On 15 July 2011, the Council (of the EU Member States) published Draft "Conclusions" (a policy statement) on Net Neutrality. In the document, the Council underlined the need to preserve the open and neutral character of the Internet and established net neutrality as "a policy objective."

While this seems - and is - positive at first reading, the document also refers to "affordable and secure high bandwidth communications and rich and diverse content and services" as "an important policy objective" - apparently establishing net neutrality as a somewhat secondary priority. In summary, therefore, the Council indicates its willingness to embrace the concept of "net neutrality" in further regulatory activities without being entirely clear on what status this "policy objective" has in the hierarchy of its communications policy.

Nonetheless, the importance of net neutrality for the economy is spelled out in some detail, with the document pointing to the fundamental role of telecommunications and broadband development for investment, job creation and economic recovery. The document points to "the need to maintain the openness of Internet while ensuring that it can continue to provide high-quality services in a framework that promotes and respects fundamental rights such as freedom of expression and freedom to conduct business."

This appears to diverge very positively from more extremist and populist views expressed recently about "civilising" the Internet and, in the US environment, experimenting with the fundamental building blocks of the Internet in order to protect the perceived needs of a narrow range of stakeholders. The draft Conclusions take a further step away from this approach when it refers to "the importance of ensuring that users can create, distribute and access content and services of their choice," moving away from the implicit support for policing of content by Internet intermediaries in the OECD Communiqué on Principles for Internet Policy-Making which made repeated references to the right to access "legitimate" content and "legitimate" sharing of information.

The biggest challenge facing the Council when seeking to defend this positive approach is the range of demands for Internet intermediaries to interfere with traffic to protect narrow vested interests such as intellectual property owners and the willingness of certain intermediaries to "voluntarily" engage in such interferences as an underhand means of "normalising" interferences by access providers in citizens' communications.

It will be increasingly difficult for Member States (as indeed it is already beginning to be the case for the European Commission) to demand that Internet intermediaries meddle with citizens' communications for the perceived benefit of certain vested interests and, simultaneously, demand that the same intermediaries not meddle with citizens' communications for their own business interests.

Draft Council conclusions on Net Neutrality (15.07.2011)
http://register.consilium.europa.eu/pdf/en/11/st12/st12950.en11.pdf

Consolidated EU telecoms regulatory framework (12.2009)
http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/policy/ecomm/doc/library/regfr...

OECD Communiqué on Principles for Internet Policy-Making (28-29.06.2011)
http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/40/21/48289796.pdf

(Contribution by Joe McNamee and Daniel Dimov - EDRi)