Netherlands Cements Net Neutrality In Law 115
Fluffeh writes "A while back, Dutch Telcos started to sing the 'We are losing money due to internet services!' song and floated new plans that would make consumers pay extra for data used by apps that conflicted with their own services — apps like Skype, for example. The politicians stepped in, however, and wrote laws forbidding this. Now, the legislation has finally passed through the Senate and the Netherlands is an officially Net Neutral country, the second in the world — Chile did this a while back."
Too bad (Score:5, Insightful)
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Does the net need a nanny state (so called)? I dunno, ask Comcast who slows connections to Netflix and torrents. Ask Comcast again, who do not throttle their own streaming service. Ask the cable channels who withhold streaming content to try and force cable subscriptions that people do not want. Ask the government who want unfettered access to everything you do online and will probably willingly sell that information to the highest bidder.
Yeah, we need net neutrality, or your idea of a "nanny state". B
Re:Too bad (Score:5, Funny)
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The Nanny State? Parroting a-holes use that word.
The Dutch Nanny State happened to be the one that for a large part co-provided all the infrastructure most telco's use. And then it just had to be privatized for no other reason other then trying to force a failing market system.
You obviously don't know what you're talking about.
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The Nanny State? Parroting a-holes use that word.
The Dutch Nanny State happened to be the one that for a large part co-provided all the infrastructure most telco's use. And then it just had to be privatized for no other reason other then trying to force a failing market system.
You obviously don't know what you're talking about.
The Government used to own the post office and telecoms. They privatized them as the company KPN. I've dealt with KPN and they are a bunch of customer hating assholes who love forcing their insane internal policies on customers. They started with a government department mentality because they were exactly that, a government department. Change comes slow in the Netherlands but it does come. With the forced separation of infrastructure other companies started providing phone and data services and the situatio
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Free market != unregulated market. A free market is a market in which prices, supply and demand are not controlled.
When a company sets up barriers to prevent other companies from competing, they are controlling the supply. Net neutrality laws specifically address this by making it illegal for an ISP to preferentially slow down or charge more for data from companies that provide the same services that the ISP provides.
The "Nanny State" argument is a false argument that suggests that net neutrality laws pre
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Nothing of what you said has made the argument that privatizing the infrastructure is a good thing. In fact, it makes it seem like a bad thing.
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Does the net really need the intervention of the Nanny State?
Yes!
Only in Europe would this blatant intervention with people's business models be tolerated. Isn't this, in effect, an uncompensated expropriation?
Yes!
And it's a good thing. Now fuck off.
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Probably.
It's 2012 and we still don't have a free market in ISPs yet. Every business who is allowed by the government (remember: we're talking about a situation where various levels of government are already heavily involved) to run wires to my home (i.e. both of them), is also in the content bundling business. How many more decades until there's competition (more than two of them)? I'm not holding my breath on that one, because I also have
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Idiot teabag nutjob (or Comcast shill)! Do you consider having the police investigate burglaries as "nanny state"? You don't even know what the fucking word means. When the state is trying to protect you from yourself, that's a nanny state. When the state is protecting you from predators like burglars, rapists, and powerful corporations, that is NOT nanny state.
Seat belt and helmet laws are nanny state laws. Environmental laws, price regulations on natural monopolies, and net neutrality are NOT nanny state,
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Only in an idiotic anarcho-capitalist state would limiting someone's access to the internet, and interfering with their traffic be considered a "business model".
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And by "our politicians" you mean?
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everywhere but the Netherlands and Chile
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And by "our politicians" you mean?
Good question. "our politicians" doesn't really make sense in any country I've seen unless you actually work inside a political party.
They are always "their politicians" working for their own personal gain.
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It's as in "our masters and overlords".
Re:Too bad (Score:5, Interesting)
Someone remind me of the specifics of when we gave telecos a bunch of taxpayer money to speed up our internet, and they, naturally, gave it to their CEOs and investors, and are now complaining they don't have the infrastructure to not throttle and cap and can't possibly afford to upgrade?
The dutch probably didn't do that. Just a wild guess.
Re:Too bad (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, we had cheap unlimited mobile internet up to about a year ago (E 9.99 for the internet add-on). Now that the customers have discovered the mobile web, mobile providers have doubled their rates three times (all in unison, fixed pricing anyone?) and adding ridiculously low data caps on their cheaper plans (100mbs a month, seriously??). Moreover, they tied the data allowance to the minutes in a plan, so if you want a 2gb cap, you'll also have to buy a ridiculous amount of minutes. Only last month some virtual providers started offering mix 'n match packages where you are free to select separate internet, voice and text packages.
Also, most non-mobile internet providers are formerly state-owned, so they didn't have to build their own networks. And if you want cable internet (triple play packages) there is absolutely no consumer choice as the Netherlands is divided between two large cable providers and a bunch of small ones, with their networks having NO overlap. Where you live decides your ISP. The only competition the cable companies have is ADSL through KPN (and a few virtual providers) and (in a few larger cities) Fiber.
Then again, we're not as screwed as Belgium where data caps are very normal (even on non-mobile) and competition is also absent.
Re:Too bad (Score:4, Informative)
Mobile service is irrelevant. Nobody actually WORKS from their phone or tablet.
And bandwidth caps in most countries are still higher than what most people in America could get by downloading movies for most of the month. One of Japan's largest ISP's (NTT), for example, received alot of bad publicity when they started a policy to slow down service to anyone downloading 30GB a day. That's almost 1TB a month. Australia, one of the most notorious countries for bandwidth restrictions, has ISP's that charge anywhere from $60 (unlimited DSL) to $130 (1TB monthly).
And the US has almost no overlap in high-speed internet networks, either. In fact, 98% of Americans have only ONE choice for broadband speeds. Everything you just complained about with the Netherlands applies to the US as well. The funny thing is that, while AT&T and Comcast both call it socialist when anyone says we should take the infrastructure back and let ISP's compete over it, they campaigned FOR that very thing in the UK because THEY were the small ISP's there.
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Mobile service is irrelevant.
Mobile was the reason the Dutch netneutrality legislation was drafted. Carriers used to selling (mobile) phone by the minute and text messages per piece wanted to apply the same ideas to data: such as Skype per minute or pay-per-video Youtube, all to be monitored through DPI.
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Mobile service is irrelevant. Nobody actually WORKS from their phone or tablet.
Hey speak for yourself man. Not all of our phones or tablets are dinky little media consumption devices.
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Our internet is half their speed, [phys.org]
that's the average speed though, Netherlands is quite small and there are no mountains as far as I know, the US on the other hand is huge, you can't expect fiber optic connections in rural areas, that's also the reason why South Korea and Japan come out on top, they are very small country, of course they are also usually better than the rest of the world when it comes to technology
Re:Too bad (Score:4, Informative)
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Please explain why metropolitain areas are still not that fast and very expensive? High relative population densities should have fast and cheap providers.
Re:Too bad (Score:5, Insightful)
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finland is more like colorado.
and lapland is like alaska. still, in most areas in lapland you can get cellular internet. get that, you might have to drive 5 hours to get vodka but you still got internet for 10 bucks a month. getting landline dsl to some places can still suck though, especially those places that don't have any copper taken to them but in cities(10 000+ population, that had telephone service) shouldn't be a problem.
now if you want to compare apples to nokias, why the fuck is mobile internet i
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The thing is, your argument completely falls apart when you look at the speeds in urban areas of the US, and they are still extremely shitty compared to their urban areas.
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you can't expect fiber optic connections in rural areas
Does that mean I CAN expect fiber optic connections to me, living in a non-rural area and still getting about the US average?
AT&T and comcast will be disappointed to hear that.
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The dutch probably didn't do that. Just a wild guess.
Actually, we did. And then we noticed that may not be the best approach and we forced the main ISP to make the phone lines available to anyone who wanted to start an ISP over ADSL.
Separation of infrastructure and service. Try it, it works. Of course, in yank country that would be "hating freedom", "destroying job creators" and other anti-monopolist tripe.
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It works, somewhat, for telecoms. It has been a waste of time and money for energy providers and a disaster for the railways. So much so that even our most privatisation-happy party is calling for renewed nationalisation of the rail infrastructure to repair the mess that separation of infrastructure and services has created.
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Actually, we had that, a loooooooong, loooooooong time ago. Then the Bush FCC decided that it was stupid, and so the line owning telcos were allowed to jack line rental rates up to astronomical levels. Needless to say, that put an end to that.
Re:Too bad (Score:5, Insightful)
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Which hint? The blokking of TPB? (Score:5, Interesting)
I am dutch, our politicians are taking the hint and have sold out en-mass to big media by ordering the blocking of The Pirate Bay despite wasting millions on a free internet project.
This means nothing, it is just a load of drivel enacted by politician who have spend the last 2 years one enacting and revoking a 130km/h speed increase, a ban on burka's now canceled again and the privatization off the rail roads now to be reversed and the admittance that the privatization of the post office was a mistake...
It is not like the economy is down the crapper, un-employment is rising and the Euro/EU is a stinking pile of crap or anything.
Be very careful what you wish for when looking at other countries, KPN, which set of the rush for this law is the company that wanted to charge extra for whatsapp recently announced with other mobile operators that they would introduce a limited business only roll out of LTE, just enough to satisfy the license demands so if you pay a premium, own a business and are in the right street, you can have modern tech before the end of the decade. The rest? Get stuffed, we are making to many millions of 3G still.
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This means nothing, it is just a load of drivel enacted by politician who have spend the last 2 years one enacting and revoking a 130km/h speed increase, a ban on burka's now canceled again and the privatization off the rail roads now to be reversed and the admittance that the privatization of the post office was a mistake...
At least you guys get rid of your crappy laws.
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Too bad our public won't take the hint, and then start to vote for real politicians.
Someone has to say it (Score:3, Funny)
Net neutrality?? What were they smoking??
Gigity :)
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Nothing illegal!
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It is indeed confusing; I've even once heard a group of locals entering the "wrong" kind of coffeeshop (a group of teenagers, 16-18yo mostly, from a local church on trip to Amsterdam wanting to have a cup of coffee). Anyway, when in doubt, use your nose.
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Why was this modded down? It might be slightly off topic, but it answers GPs question and is factually correct.
Still charging high prices for data though (Score:2, Informative)
Note this will not keep them from charging high rates for datatraffic, or setting very low caps, and charge lots more if you go over your allotment. Has cost me hundreds of euros per month for several months.
My iPhone appeared to be very uninformative about which apps were the data hungry culprit, and Apple has blocked API's for third-party developers. Also it seems that when you enable sending diagnostics info to apple, crashdumps will be sent AT NIGHT OVER 3G EVEN IF YOU ARE AT HOME ON WIFI!
My Dutch prov
Re:Still charging high prices for data though (Score:4, Interesting)
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I'm a bit of a "fandroid", but even I have to point out that you can only use Droidwall if you root your device. Rooting your device is similar to jailbreaking an iPhone (in a lot of cases, but not all as some manufacturers will allow you to [rom] unlock their phones).
If you jailbreak your iPhone, you can install Firewall iP which afaik will give you the same results.
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If you dont really need a firewall, and are looking to just block 3g/wifi on a per-app basis, you should try LBE Privacy Guard. It allows you set pretty much every permission on a per-app basis (3g, wifi, location, contacts, call information etc).
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I use Onavo. Free and similar.
Also, since I upgraded to Android ICS I've seen more options to control the data from the settings so I recommend people check that out first.
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Dunno about iPhone but Android lets you disable WiFi or mobile data very easily. Switch it on only when you need it. Best adblocker possible, too.
incomplete article. (Score:1, Insightful)
A day after this was announced all Dutch ISPs were ordered to block TPB.
http://torrentfreak.com/five-more-dutch-isps-given-10-days-to-censor-the-pirate-bay-120510/
The US isn't the only country that is getting destroyed by lobbyists and religious nutjobs.
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I can see the links between pirate bay being blocked and lobbyists, but the line from either to net neutrality I'm a little blurry on. I was under the impression that was copyright law and didn't overlap much with ISPs charging content providers more for preferential treatment.
The religious nutjobs I really don't see the connection between, but given that they're just bad news in general, I'll go ahead and assume the
Re:incomplete article. (Score:5, Interesting)
The religious nutjobs, I have no idea how they fits in.
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With this law an ISP is not allowed to block domains. But there are exceptions for court orders (like the piratebay) and when a customer *wants* to have domains blocked .
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You know, if you're going to bash hate crime laws, it might do you well to actually educate yourself on how they are used. A crime committed by someone of Race A against someone of Race B is NOT automatically a hate crime. Courts take things like "motive" and "intent" into account. If Guy A mugs Guy B, and it goes wrong and Guy A kills Guy B, that is not a hate crime. However, If Guy A lynches Guy B in the public park, and hangs a sign around his neck saying "Die [Insert appropriate racial slur here]!" or s
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The religious nutjobs do sometimes like to mutter a line about copyright infringement being theft and thus sinful, but it's so far down their long list of priorities that they hardly ever even think about it. They have a hundred things they consider more impor
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Religious nutjobs as such don't, but they do heavily overlap with the anti-regulation faction of conservative, who are involved.
To be pedantic, they aren't "anti-regulation". They are very much in favor of regulation. Just for things they like. In the US, for example, they claim to be for "smaller government", yet invite the government into the bedroom, and want to regulate who can marry whom.
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The US isn't the only country that is getting destroyed by lobbyists and religious nutjobs.
What in hell does religion have to do with Net neutrality? Would you fucking offtopic antitheists give it a god damned rest? In very few slashdot discussions is religion relevant at all. Offtopic+flamebait-troll. So please knock it the fuck off.
Mods, I'm offtopic, sorry, but these assholes are getting under my skin.
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Didn't stop net censorship. (Score:5, Insightful)
Net neutrality is a great step, but on the same day a judge ordered all ISPs in the Netherlands to block the Pirate Bay. You win some you lose some.
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It's worse than that. A judge has forbidden linking to operating or listing proxies that allow or show how to access TPB which in turn only links to stuff hosted elsewhere.
Are you saying that it is illegal to link to a proxy which allows access to TPB?
Doesn't that include any VPN connection to a network in a foreign non-TBP-blocking country, unless the administrator of that network has blocked access to TPB?
If yes, I guess that a lot of employees of foreign companies could be in trouble when they access the company network through VPN during a travel in The Netherlands.
This is challenged (Score:4, Insightful)
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Exactly. This is just banning deep packet inspection not true net nutrality.
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Ahh, damn. I was about to go find 10 cubic meters of obsidian and build myself a portal.
3 fist sized diamonds and 10m^3 of obsidian is cheaper than a plane ticket, and non-invasive.
I'm torn. (Score:3)
On the one hand, net neutrality would be great. On the other hand, our (American) politicians don't have a snowball's chance in Hell of getting the legislation right. [sigh]
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The problem with the bills that have been submitted in the USA use a different definition of net neutrality than you see in the Dutch and other laws.
The Dutch law limits blocking protocols unless they are don't to all, in the USA the bills have been more about not being able to block sites or to provide sites. So under the USA bills ISPs would not beable to block a site to MANBLA or even SPAM that followed the rules on the
Nice, but incomplete (Score:2, Informative)
Unfortunately it contains an exception that still requires ISPs to block websites deemed copyright-infringing by a judge. Soon, almost all ISPs will be blocking the Pirate Bay (although they are still on appeal). Fortunately, free proxies are popping up like mushrooms, so it doesn't have must direct effect, but it still effectively requires ISPs to set up theur system for censorship through DNS+IP blocking.
... and block websites. (Score:5, Informative)
And, in other news, a Dutch judge approved blocking of the piratebay, as requested by a private party Brein (dutch RIAA).
The net neutrality law actually allows blocking of sites through court orders.
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Which means absolutely nothing.. (Score:3, Informative)
..because all you need is a judge to agree otherwise. The law specifically includes an exception to allow the Dutch court to deviate from neutrality.
Gettings a judge to agree in the Netherlands is not that hard as some recent court cases show.
Re:Which means absolutely nothing.. (Score:5, Informative)
There is another exception, by the way: providers are still allowed to block certain sites at the request of the subscriber. There is a Dutch provider (Kliksafe) which offers pre-filtered Internet connections that are deemed safe for members of the Dutch Reformed church, whatever that means (maybe they shut off on Sunday...)
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of course it matters. if you can't see the difference in being blocked to visit tpb. vs. being billed per torrent downloaded..
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Well, with one, the Telco can control exactly what you can and cannot do online. With the other, they still have to convince a judge that the one site needs to be blocked. The second one has a level of judicial review and due process. The first one does not.
The block pirate bay. (Score:2)
How can they be net neutral yet block pirate bay? Either it's all just internet traffic or it's something to stick your dirty fingers in in order to increase profit for you and your cronies.
They are as conflicted and subject to legal trolling as any other country.
Wow (Score:2)
Hypocricy (Score:2)
A gov't that puts its citizens' welfare... (Score:2)
...ahead of its corporations' greed. What a novel concept! We should try that here in North America!
It's so much fairer and more sensible when the dog wags the tail instead of vice versa