All articles

In November 2015, the European Union adopted the Net Neutrality Regulation (2015/2120), which contained a number of compromises that needed clarification. The Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC) was given the task of developing implementation guidelines to ensure a consistent application of the Regulation throughout Europe and, in practice, to settle the remaining ambiguities of the adopted Regulation.

On 5 October, AKVorrat filed a complaint against mobile operator Hutchison Drei based on Drei's violations of net neutrality principles. Now the operator has given in and stopped the offending practice. At the same time, Drei has more than quadrupled data volumes included in its data plans, and in some cases has even increased them 17-fold. This shows that net neutrality is beneficial to service operators as well as customers, even though the telecoms industry would rather ignore the new net neutrality provisions in EU law.

This summer, the EU established strong net neutrality protections for its citizens. After three years of fierce negotiations a broad coalition of activists, journalists, media associations, academics, librarians and startups brought about the enshrinement in law of the principles that make the Internet the free ecosystem of innovative ideas we know today. After the United States of America, Canada, Brazil, India and now the European Union have established similar laws to protect the Internet’s openness, we may be witnessing a global trend.

Tomorrow telecom regulators from all over the EU will gather in Brussels for a uniquely challenging task: analysing over half a million responses to their consultation on net neutrality.