This morning, the Committee on Industry, Research and Energy of the European Parliament (ITRE) formally accepted the text of the informal trialogue negotiations on the “Telecommunications Single Market” Regulation, which covers net neutrality and roaming. The text represents a significant improvement on the incoherent, contradictory and destructive approach promoted by the EU Council and European Commission. However, the provisional agreement still needs further crucial improvements, as key parts of the text, such as on ‘traffic management” and “specialised services” are extremely unclear. The biggest problem of the current text is that “price discrimination” – where Internet users pay for a certain volume of download capacity, but get unlimited access to some websites but not all the internet, resulting in unequal rights to send and receive information – is not explicitly addressed. Furthermore, the right of individual Member States to ban such abuses of net neutrality is not definitively protected.
https://edri.org/press-release-edri-asks-for-more-clarity-on-net-neutrality/
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/committees/en/itre/publications.html?id=20150715CPU04884
https://edri.org/files/NN_analysis_20150715.pdf
Net Neutrality – Analysis and background of trialogue compromise