European Commission consults on net neutrality

Commissioner for the Digital Agenda Neelie Kroes says EC must be balanced and objective on the issue of net neutrality

The European Commission has launched a consultation on some of the key points of contention surrounding net neutrality.

The debate, which centres on whether ISPs should be able to prioritise certain types of traffic, has been raging for several years now in the US, where parties on both sides of the argument have spent millions lobbying Congress to have their voices heard.

The European Commission has frequently repeated its desire to maintain an open and neutral internet, with former information society commissioner Viviane Reding claiming she would be the “first line of defence” against threats to the status quo.

The current consultation encourages service and content providers, consumers, businesses and researchers to feed back to the Commission before 30 September, after which time the results will be fed in to a larger Commission report on net neutrality due out by the end of the year.

Commissioner for the Digital Agenda Neelie Kroes argued that consumers should be able to access the content they want, but that content providers and operators “should have the right incentives to keep innovating”.

“Traffic management and net neutrality are highly complex issues. I do not assume that one approach or another should prevail,” she added.

“We need input from all sides so we can examine all the issues carefully, in a very objective way, strike the right balance between all the interests involved and work out what new measures, if any, may be needed."

ISP Eclipse Internet welcomed the consultation.

"It’s imperative that ISPs provide their customers with greater visibility of web traffic to meet their ever growing network demands," argued Eclipse director Clodagh Murphy.

“ISPs also need to be entirely open and honest to customers about throttling policies from the point of sale. The phrase ‘’unlimited broadband’ is thrown around too easily by too many companies, and this is so often not the case."

The consultation is part of the Commission’s commitments made in the 2009 EU telecoms reform package.

This new framework empowers member states to set minimum quality levels for network transmission services while also requiring that consumers are informed pre-contract of any traffic management techniques or other limitations on their service and likely impact.

The consultation comes just a week after UK regulator Ofcom published a draft discussion paper on the subject.