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EU The Courts The Internet Technology

Europe's Top Court Says Net Neutrality Rules Bar 'Zero Rating' (techcrunch.com) 81

Posted by BeauHD from the first-of-its-kind dept.
The European Union's top court has handed down its first decision on the bloc's net neutrality rules -- interpreting the law as precluding the use of commercial 'zero rating' by Internet services providers. TechCrunch reports: 'Zero rating' refers to the practice of ISPs offering certain apps/services 'tariff free' by excluding their data consumption. It's controversial because it can have the effect of penalizing and/or blocking the use of non-zero-rated apps/services, which may be inaccessible while the zero rated apps/services are not -- which in turn undermines the principal of net neutrality with its promise of fair competition via an equal and level playing field for all things digital. The pan-EU net neutrality regulation came into force in 2016 amid much controversy over concerns it would undermine rather than bolster a level playing field online. So the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU)'s first ruling interpreting the regulation is an important moment for regional digital rights watchers.

A Budapest court hearing two actions against Telenor, related to two of its 'zero rating' packages, made a reference to the CJEU for a preliminary ruling on how to interpret and apply Article 3(1) and (2) of the regulation -- which safeguards a number of rights for end users of Internet access services and prohibits service providers from putting in place agreements or commercial practices limiting the exercise of those rights -- and Article 3(3), which lays down a general obligation of "equal and non-discriminatory treatment of traffic." The court found that 'zero rating' agreements that combine a 'zero tariff' with measures blocking or slowing down traffic linked to the use of 'non-zero tariff' services and applications are indeed liable to limit the exercise of end users' rights within the meaning of the regulation and on a significant part of the market. It also found that no assessment of the effect of measures blocking or slowing down traffic on the exercise of end users' rights is required by the regulation, while measures applied for commercial (rather than technical) reasons must be regarded as automatically incompatible. The full CJEU judgement is available here.
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Europe's Top Court Says Net Neutrality Rules Bar 'Zero Rating' More

Europe's Top Court Says Net Neutrality Rules Bar 'Zero Rating'

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  • Net Neutrality is an antitrust measure (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jensend ( 71114 ) on Tuesday September 15, 2020 @08:53PM (#60509864)

    I think the advocates of Net Neutrality and its detractors have a strong tendency to talk past each other, and I think it's largely because of how people frame the issue.

    Net Neutrality was not important in dial-up days when the last-mile connection was a public utility and the internet service running on it was a competitive market. If you have 50 options for ISPs, market pressures will generally keep any of them from choosing to do nefarious things. If they did, customers would flock to other providers.

    When people have only one to four options for getting broadband, that's just not true any more. I think there's plenty of room to debate specifics of net neutrality. I'm not sure whether banning zero-rating outright is the best way to regulate the practice. But the basic idea - products and services which are vital to modern life and only provided by a few oligopolies should have some basic regulation to preserve the public interest - is nothing new or specific to the Internet. It's the same kind of antitrust concerns that have been part of how we keep open markets working ever since 1890.

    • Net Neutrality detractors are not good faith (Score:4, Insightful)

      by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Tuesday September 15, 2020 @09:16PM (#60509914)
      we know this because every time it comes up for public comment there are tens of thousands of obviously fake comments.

      Support for NN is overwhelming. Only a handful of industry shills and the politicians they've bought off oppose it. There's no reasoning with those people because, as Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

      • The devil is in the details. To say your are for NN as a carte blanche statement without knowing what the costs are is pointless. Its like saying you are all about lower prices. Everybody is for lower prices. I dont know anyone that says || hell no I dont like no lower prices ||

        But if lower prices come at the cost of slave labor, now suddenly people have a different opinion about THAT PARTICULAR lower price arrangement.

        Stop trying to make the argument so black and white. This recent ruling is not helping th

    • Re:Net Neutrality is an antitrust measure (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Richard_at_work ( 517087 ) on Tuesday September 15, 2020 @09:32PM (#60509940)

      Here in NZ, the last mile for fibre is owned by a company that cannot provide services to end users - it must sell connectivity to anyone who wants to use it. This means I can get a huge variance of services from a wide range of ISPs at all sorts of price points - for example, my current gigabit service costs me $100 NZD a month (static IP, unlimited and no traffic management), but there are companies out there that sell gigabit for less (with dynamic IP, caps etc) or more, or sell a 200Mbit service etc etc etc.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by HiThere ( 15173 )

        That's the way it should be done. That's the way it was done in dial-up days (at least in the US). But that went out when cable came in with lots of political deals.

        • Dialup died because we simply could not squeeze more than 64k over a call. It goes back to how we frame the T-1s and DS3s. Each DS0 is a 64k time slice. Except in europe where the E1 is 56k channels (more channels but they robbed a few bits from each channel to get partway there). Which is why you never saw more than a 56k modem even though they could have had a 64k one for north america and japan (a J1 is identical to a T1)

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by HiThere ( 15173 )

            While true, that doesn't talk about the control over access. Cable companies made deals with cities for exclusive access. Then there were mergers and buy-outs, and local monopolies turned into regional monopolies. Fiber adopted the game plan being used by the cable monopolies.

            It's true that fiber and cable are natural monopolies, but it's not true that ISPs are necessarily the same companies as the supplier of fast access. ISPs aren't natural monopolies, they're ones engineered by political deals.

            • Not exactly. Ive been in the industry since the days of dial-up. Natural monopolies occurred because of the last-mile problems.

              Going back 75years cities were overrun with telephone poles and wiring. It was an unsightly mess. So things like public services commissions (PSC) csme about because 1) we could not have 10 phone companies stringing cables into a big ball of yarn
              2) to protect the consumer now that we declared single monopolies got to own a cities access. The same issue occurs with power. It would be

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by HiThere ( 15173 )

                I think I'm looking from a slightly earlier point in time than you are, because when I'm talking about the weren't ANY companies with widely spread out coax networks. To put those in was where the political deals started. The companies that put in the coax shouldn't have been allowed to be the same companies that controlled what content was seen over the coax. The problem was the phone companies didn't want anything to do with that alternative network, and the only people willing to pay for it were the c

      • But there is no last mile for wireless carriers and they get sucked into these rulings too. That fiber cross-connect you are referring to was something I have been advocating for here strongly since 2003. If fact I have been so vocal about it, I wonder if someone in NZ had read one of my detailed examples of how it should work and then ran with the idea. In any event, Im glad the physical last mile is agnostic. What I have not been able to devise is a way for that to work with the wireless phone carriers. Y

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by antdude ( 79039 )

      Let's go back to dial-up!

  • When the United States was formed, there was a reason that the roads and postal service were nationalized and controlled by the government. Those things create a "marketplace" where everyone needs to be treated equally, and they should be transparent. Privatized roads would have resulted in what happened with the railroads, where players that could make deals with the railroad owners got preferential treatment. It took federal regulation in the US so onerous that the railroads were effectively nationlize

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by bws111 ( 1216812 )

      The roads were certainly NOT 'nationalized and controlled by the government' when the US was formed. The country's first engineered road (the Philadelphia/Lancaster Turnpike), built in 1795, was private, as were virtually all other roads. The first state to even allow the state to be involved in road building was New Jersey, and that happened in the 1890s. The federal government didn't get involved until 1916. Even then, roads such as the Lincoln Highway (NYC to San Francisco) and the Dixie Highway (Can

  • Zero-rating is a textbook example of a net neutrality violation.

    Zero-rating some services is the same as having you pay a premium for using other services, just worded differently.

    We could make an exception for charities and public services but Facebook definitely isn't that.

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