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great. Yeah, welcome to our talk.
We will talk about Natalie,
obviously with a focus
on what happened in the last year and
also what happened in the past years in
the Netherlands, particularly because
they have a net neutrality law
for quite some time now.
And we want to look at experience, what
lessons can be learned from it, and
also look at more global and European
perspective.
But first to us,
too, my name is Thomas Cloninger.
I based in Vienna and
therefore in for City.
And that's what I hate.
I'm also a member of the Catholic Church
of Germany and I had the privilege
to work with European digital rights
in their Brussels office
during the hot phase of the negotiations
about telecoms, single market proposal,
the net neutrality law in Europe that
we will talk about.
So I'm ready and I'm working
for bits of freedom.
We are a Dutch civil rights
organization, and
because lots of topics which
have an impact on the Netherlands are
coming from a European level,
we are also working a lot in Brussels
with Edry and other organizations.
And at the end of this
talk, we would like you to remember two
things.
So the first thing would be ordinary
citizens put inevitability on the
political agenda before and
we need to do that again.
The second thing I want you to remember
when you leave this hole is
there are there are a number of
unsolved issues and we
need your expertize to solve those
problems. But first, let's get back to
what is the
problem.
Yeah, we have a simple definition here
from this is net neutrality dot org,
which is on the website of the Global
Coalition on net neutrality, where NGOs
from all around the world assemble to
fight more and more globalized battle
when it comes to open Internet
and freedom online.
And basically, it states that we have
to keep the Internet open
as a platform and
prevent discrimination from all sorts.
You can also look at net neutrality from
its principles.
And there are really three principles.
First is end to end, so
to Internet different and other
networks like, for example, the TV
network is a network of peers there.
Every end note as the possibility
to make a connection to any other end
note. And there is no centralized
control. There is no one single
authorization hub where we have to
register, where I have to
ask for allowance for every connection
that I want to establish.
Instead, it's left up to the endnotes
to decide whether a connection
is legitimate, is correct, is legal.
This is both a technological decision.
Back in the days when the Internet was
invented, it served the purpose
of implementing
the optimal network design because we
didn't have to calculate the power to
make decisions in the natural cops.
But it's also a political decision about
disabling control within the
network.
The second principle, which is tied into
that is the best effort.
Best effort means that within
the Internet, within the transit nodes,
there should be no differentiation
between packages.
So every data packet is
transmitted like every other, and there
should be no distinction based on the
protocol or the source or
the destination or
legality of the packages.
This best effort principle also applies
not only to technical discrimination, but
also to economic discriminations.
Because what we see increasingly is
that the price of certain data
packages varies that some
packages cost more than others.
There's a practice called zero rating
where certain services
are excluded from your monthly data cap.
So even if you have no megabytes left for
this month, you can still use Facebook
or Spotify and stuff like that.
And there's a third principle that
is essential for understanding the
debate. And that's the reason why
we have to fight this fight, because
providers want to vertically integrate
along the value chain of their network.
They see how much money can be made
with us as consumers, with us,
as users who give away their data.
And they just want to have a piece of the
cake. They want to have a piece
of the profits that Google or Amazon are
making with us over their network.
So in a way, they see us as their captive
audience and their goal is to
establish a kind of double sided market
where they sell us
their customers to the service providers
that want to reach us or
don't just sell us Internet instead deals
or want to sell us each individual
service that we want to use.
We put this in pictures and
you might know that because that's a very
popular image was created several years
ago and we were often called female.
As for putting something like that up,
you know, like you have to pay if you
want to play World of Warcraft or
if you want to read The New York Times.
So every single service suddenly has
a price tag on the Internet.
But sadly, this has become reality.
This is an offer of T-Mobile,
Hungary.
They are even worse offers from
Orange, France, where you have
each individual type of service with
a price that is actually not euros D-R
Hungarian forint but
Google Translate. Thank you.
But we have seen a
huge increase in
the products in Europe that violate
net neutrality.
According to the Digital Fuel Monitor.
We are a little bit above hundred
of such net neutrality violating products
right now in Europe.
So this is a debate which is happening
really fast and the market is creating
facts.
Delena politicians wait to establish
any meaningful legislation that would
safeguard it in the long run,
their window of opportunity to just
create new facts and abolish the
principle of net neutrality.
But now on the bright side to
the Netherlands.
So that doesn't happen if you have an
energy enshrined by law.
And that's what happened in the
Netherlands.
We have this law since 2013
when in effect, beginning of 2013.
So we have this law now for about
two years
that didn't come, that
didn't just fall out from the sky.
We, uh, the law
became came there because after
a long debate and
that debate or so the debate, we couldn't
do that by our own we as bits of freedom.
We have been doing this with lots of work
with volunteers.
So two years before this debate
started, we already wrote down a
position paper in which we said
why neutrality is important and
how it should how it should look like
that position paper was written with the
help of volunteers.
And when KPN
announced they were thinking
they were planning to to,
uh, to monetize the use of WhatsApp
by their users, um,
people got angry and
we were able to build a campaign site and
have those people explain their
angriness with the politicians, with
members of parliament, and only because
all those people did that, um,
it became a topic on a political
agenda.
And that's very important to remember,
because it will it shows that
if you are angry
about something and you tell politicians
about it, then something can change.
And without you speaking out, the
change will not happen.
So.
Then what actually we have
in law to
read a law, it's very important to look
first at the explanatory memorandum,
it's a kind of addendum to the law
and which explains why you have
this law. And in the Netherlands
law, that is explanatory memorandum
is very clear.
It says the net neutrality article
aims to maximize the choice and freedom
of expression on the Internet for end
users.
It also says that end users
should be able to decide what content
they want to send and receive.
So if there is
something unclear about a text in the
law, if there are
different interpretations of the law,
then the lawyers will look at this
explanatory memorandum to see how
it should be, how they should
decide on that.
So this
text in its explanatory memorandum is a
very important part of the law.
The law itself says providers of
Internet access services do not hinder
or slow down applications and services
on the Internet.
So.
They are not allowed to block access
to specific websites, they are not
allowed to throttle access
to other websites, and of
course, this is a rule.
So there are exceptions.
And in this case, there are four
exceptions. I will mention two of them.
The first exception is to minimize
the effects of congestion.
So think of a
location where you have only
a limited amount of capacity.
Think of a music festival.
You have lots of users in
a very short period and on a temporary,
if temporary, lots of users in a small
location. And the capacity
of network may not be sufficient
for the use for all of the
users.
So the network operator in that case may
restrict traffic,
certain traffic.
He may restrict access to certain
websites.
But and that's the second half of the
sentence, it's important then
that equal types of traffic
that they are treated equally
and that means if such
a network operator would decide to block
access to YouTube, he would also
need to, uh, to block access to
similar websites like the video.
A second exception is to preserve
the integrity and security of the network
and, um, and, uh, the
surface of the provider or the customer
premises equipment.
So, uh, director of the customer,
think of a twenty four that is hijacked
and that is only serving, uh, nasty
malware and a nasty malware, maybe,
um, maybe of harm to
the um to the network.
In that case, um,
the provider may choose
to block access to the network.
And then there's one other part of the
provision, which is very important, it's
this one and says providers do not
make the price dependent on the services
or the applications which are offered or
used.
So a provider is in the not
allowed to
allow a story to publish
or to make available a
a new service, which is
competitive to the ones already on the
Internet and not charge for that
one while charging for the other ones.
Or if they get into agreement
with, for example, Spotify not
charging for Spotify.
So that will be in just
like terms already explained, it will be
not.
So that would not get off from the data
cap you have.
So how does that compare to other laws
around the world?
Yeah, um, we made
yeah, we made a little comparison
chart about how these different
laws compare
to each other.
And here you have like
most of the net neutrality legislations
that are around the world right now.
And it's not only just loss,
it's also what we call soft law, like
self-regulation, where the regulator
and the ISPs come together and
make some rules.
And then the ISP
decides that he wants to follow this like
a little bit like corporate social
responsibility.
We decided we don't want to do the nasty
stuff these soft laws
usually have. The big problem that they
are not enforceable are Norway
was the first country in the world to do
anything about net neutrality back in
2008.
And they also have this big ISP
called Telenor.
And this one just decided
you want to step out of the soft
regulation and just
basically do whatever he wants
to know. Was also the second ISP
off the Comcast to go into an agreement
with Netflix.
So soft lights don't work hard laws.
The only stuff that really matters
then, price discrimination.
That's exactly what Rio just mentioned
before, that I don't discriminate
based on the network, on the technical
side, but only on the economic side
of the pricing of certain data packages.
And that we see that
Chile and Netherlands have really
good solutions found for that, honestly,
is one of the best in the world.
And on the other side, it's particularly
Dael where we have soft laws.
This is not in the scope
then prevent to light
as SS stands for
specialized services.
I'm sure you heard of that.
Specialized services.
We all know it as a play.
If you do not only buy Internet from your
ISP, but also your telephone
and your TV, it's called
a triple play or a specialized service
because there are other services running
through the same pipes, but they are not
Internet. There is something different.
That's also what qualifies a specialized
service. It is special.
It's not just not a random online
service that we know from the Internet
and under this category, also
legitimately for things like
telemedicine. If you want to do an
operation, you don't want to do it over
the Internet like self-driving
cars and Industry 4.0, whatever
that means. If it's a critical thing,
then you don't want to run it over the
Internet, then it is a specialized
service because it's set apart from
everything else that's happening on the
Internet.
But there's a problem of that.
Although we have this nicely laid out
concept, which is also
historically have been has been the way
in which regulators looked at
the market and looked what Internet
service providers did all around the
world.
Slowly, these barriers between online
services and specialized services
have weakened and things have been
reclassified.
And these days we see stuff
like Spotify, like Zappos, like
Dailymotion being
operated under the category of
specialized services or managed services,
whatever you want to call it.
And they're just abusing
these loopholes, which often also
exist in net neutrality legislation.
This is a huge thing for for
the European debate will
come to in a minute.
So we have this knowledge.
What specialized services are it?
We can go back to the table and see that
Slovenia is actually the best country
that managed to distinguish these two
types of services.
And the Netherlands and Chile,
which have in principle really good
legislations, just don't
have this in their scope because usually
just don't have to regulate specialized
services. If you just want to keep the
Internet open and free, you can do
it with plain and simple
nondiscrimination rules.
And if the regulator
does its job well, then usually you
don't have to worry about just
reclassifying services.
Just to go a little bit in the other
columns, blocking of
competitors is a.
Usually something which comes with every
net neutrality legislation, you you'll
know that if you have
think Vodafone is it here in Germany, if
you have a contract and they prohibit
you from using Skype or any other voice
of IP service
so that you have to use their expensive
roaming instead of going to a competitor,
that's a widespread practice here
in Europe that you block your competitors
in terms of services so that your
customers have no freedom of choice and
cannot switch to another service.
And yet there are
only these two laws in Europe, in
the Netherlands and Slovenia, U.K.
and Switzerland have some nonfunctional,
soft regulations.
And funny enough, South Korea is the only
country in Asia that they touch to
subject
will go to the Latin
American countries later.
But now to the European debate.
That's really where the meat of this talk
lies.
In September 2013, the European
Commission proposed new regulation
called Telecoms Single Market.
That's a huge legislative package which
regulates stuff like roaming,
acquiring spectrums, but also
net neutrality.
But sadly, the net neutrality parts of
this law were really like the opposite
of net neutrality.
They would allow ISPs to basically
do everything they want, to have the
vertical integration and establish
themselves as gatekeepers what we can do
online.
So we were really outraged about
this proposal.
And then we decided a year ago
he and Circusy free
to start a campaign while
we launched a campaign.
It was already up to a year ago.
And you can still find it on the Internet
that you and this campaign
really tipped the favor in
the European Parliament.
We wanted citizens to first
get them informed about what's happening
here and also get them engaged and
do something about the Internet.
And we offered them free ways of doing
that.
First, of course, they could send an
email to their parliamentarians
and also they could call them free of
charge.
And the really funny thing was that
we also had the possibility of
sending faxes to the offices of the MEPs.
And this was funny.
And this was new because
in the European Parliament,
it's like the fax machine
is also the printer.
So you cannot really disconnect the fax
machine without also disconnecting the
printer and.
And so people could just go to
the website, we had some boilerplate
texts, which was also
at the current debate, you know, like
which committee is discussing what, but
people could also just put in their
random messages and make
their message come out physically
in the office of the MP.
And this was
a huge success.
Here are some facts about it.
Over 40000 faxes were
sent out, at least from
twenty one thousand. We can
say for sure that it was delivered
because we only had the free seven
gateways. So at the high peaks,
there were much more faxes that we could
send through.
But still, this is a lot of paper and
that is
the website we had.
So if the Internet was translated in
nine languages and they want to touch on
this subject because particularly for
this technical audience, this might be
interesting.
The whole website was on GitHub.
So the source code of our campaign
website was an open source
collaborative portal.
And so everybody could look at the
source code, proposed changes.
And we also had a new section where you
could learn how to translate
the whole website.
And that's the reason why we managed
to have nine translations even in Albania
are not even part of the EU, but somebody
from Albania thought this is an important
issue.
I want my people to be informed about it.
So I think this is really a best practice
for the digital civil liberties
community that we should open source our
campaigns, not only that others can learn
from it, but also to allow
other people to to get engaged and
maybe collaborate on language, on
languages, or
just find typos.
And yeah, I mentioned before that
I had the privilege to work
in Brussels with the European Digital
Rights Office, and we did a lot
of advocacy work there, you have
to understand either the European digital
rights as well as access now to
all the organizations that take care of
our civil liberties within
Brussels in the European bubble.
And they do in tremendously important
work. And we
did so many things over these months.
But few want to highlight
because they are also best practices.
We analyzed each and every
amendment that was tabled to the
legislative text.
We wrote booklets.
We wrote many one pages.
For example, look at small and medium
sized companies involved in the debate.
Net neutrality is also a competition
issue, and they helped us
a lot because suddenly it was not just
left liberals civil liberty, people
calling their MEPs, it was companies
from their own country telling them,
I will lose my existence or I will
have a much harder time competing
online if you pass this legislation.
And this helped a lot.
And one thing, why this
lady here, Neelie Kroes, the Commissioner
for Digital Agenda back then,
is on the bema right now, is that
we also had many lobby
documents that we created to kind of keep
ahead of the narrative, which was always
pressure because the telecom lobby was
was always fighting with us.
It was really a short term battle.
And we had
one really good trick which worked well,
which was that we made our messages
funny.
We like we wrote subtitles to speeches
of the commissioner, which not only
showed real meaning of what you were
saying, but they also were funny.
They revealed the truth
and the assistants like them.
The assistants ended it round to their
friends in the parliament.
And so our messages spread really widely,
much faster than they would usually do.
We have to look at the time.
But to finish
up with Europe, that's basically the
outcome that we had. We won in plenary
with the votes of the Social Democrats,
the Liberals, the Greens and the left,
and we got real net neutrality.
You will see it later on the legal
comparison.
This is a huge success because nobody
believed it would actually make it in the
European Parliament.
It was so close to the election.
It's such a complex issue.
But still, because people got engaged,
we could turn to favor
and and to parliamentarians passed
a really good text.
Still, the text is not perfect because
enforcement is weak, but we'll come to
that later.
First, I want to go to
the the basic principle of
how a law is done in Europe looks like
that the commission proposes legislation.
Only the commission can do that.
And then it has to go through the
parliament where all the representatives
that we all votes it, the
751 people and we have
to council where the 28 member state
sits. So mostly the ministries,
when it comes to net neutrality, it's
mostly the economic or the infrastructure
ministry that deals with these things.
So currently we're at this stage, the
commission proposed really shitty tax
which were kill, that in reality the
parliament saved it.
And now it's up to the council because
it's one one and the council
is the fight where we are right now.
And to give you an overview, again, in
the same scheme as before,
the commission proposed something really
bad, which basically fails on all levels.
The parliament did a
great job.
They like they put a solution forward.
Then the Italian presidency
had two proposals,
more or less. Both of them push it.
And then the Polish and the Dutch
government came forward with really good
language.
They more or less oriented themselves
on the Dutch legislation and
really proposed a good text.
We're speaking of October, November here.
And it really looked good back then.
But this December, Germany
put forward a text which
changed the whole game because Germany
proposed the tax, which would basically
allow all sorts of discrimination
on all levels to even allow
blocking your competitors, which
is something most national legislation
would never do.
And even the Italians allowed that.
But the Germans still would
allow that in their text.
And the real satirical thing is that they
are selling this as a compromise.
Merkel is saying this is a compromise
between the Internet society
and the industry lobby.
It is not a compromise, not even closely.
And we have to call them out,
particularly the Social Democrats,
because it Sigmar Gabriel, who is
negotiating this, and the Social
Democrats still have some
pressure points. They still feel
something. I think the conservatives are
lost in this issue.
But the Social Democrats, I
think there is still hope. And this is an
issue which has to be resolved within
Germany.
In the council, we have some
other big countries which are opposing
us. And so if Germany is following up
on this line, the outlook is quite
that.
So save the Internet was
like relaunching the Web 2.0, and
we now have a new
website which allows you to send
emails to the ministries and
the permanent representatives of your
country.
Again, you have boilerplate e-mails, but
it's better if you write your own text
why you think that mentality is important
from your perspective.
And just to
summarize the European stuff.
There's a basic premise,
a basic goal behind what
the commission and Germany,
as well as the U.K.
and Spain, all countries
with big incumbent telcos like
Deutsche Telekom, like Vodafone,
like Telefonica, big ISPs that
automatically engaged the old want,
market consolidation just means
instead of the like 150
small and medium ISPs that we have right
now in Europe, they want to shrink
it down to just four big pan-European
ISPs. Very similarly to the wider
American market is structured right now.
There are several reasons for that.
They believe that this will boost
economy, economy, or else
it would create more jobs and ultimately
it would lead to more infrastructure
investment.
They know that it will cost billions
to make Europe
fit when it comes to fiber, to
the new benefits that we all need for the
21st century.
And they believe this bet
that if we give the ISPs
regulatory holidays, they will just start
investing in infrastructure.
The second summary of the tape is that we
sat in the council.
We are really good at getting people
engaged to the commission and also to the
parliament.
But when it comes to the council, well,
28 member states sit
as Internet society.
We don't have the capacity
or the architecture to really
put pressure on that.
Organizations like Greenpeace can do that
because they are in every country and
coordinate pan-European.
We still have to catch up in this regard
because we see it as not only net
neutrality or the fight about data
retention and data protection or similar
and have to hurry up national fallbacks
are necessary because if we fail with
this law, the earliest we will get
European legislation that would safeguard
net neutrality is 2018.
And remember what I said before, the
market is creating facts, so we
may not have time until 2018
at the earliest.
So maybe national fallbacks are necessary
to at least keep the principle of life in
some European countries.
Now to the Dutch experience.
Thank you.
So before we had another
tragedy in the Netherlands, the
telcos were explaining
to the people, like,
if you have an android, you by law, then
your subscription will be a lot
more expensive than it is now.
And I could tell you our experience,
that's not the case. Maybe it has become
a bit more expensive, but definitely not
that expensive that there's a lot of
difference.
But what did we
experience?
So the Dutch law is
being enforced by an array named
AQM It's the authority for
consumers and markets.
And
I can say if I would say that the
enforcement is mediocre at best.
There have been five five investigations
have started and
three of those are still underway
and only two of them have a ruling.
One of those rulings is quite good.
The other one is surprisingly bad.
The first one is
within that in a train and
train in the Netherlands is more like
this.
So the Internet train is offered by
T-Mobile for the mobile
network, and of course, everyone
is limited and is frequently changing
capacity that is available.
And without network management,
of course, that will be
not working at all.
So that's railways is
blocking access to video websites
and is throttling
file sharing protocols.
And the question brought forward to the
NRA was, is that a
violation of net neutrality?
The NRA said, we believe
that in this case, blocking and delaying
services that require large capacity
is necessary to minimize the effects of
congestion on mobile connection.
So the NRA said it's not a violation
because four for one,
it's necessary because there's a limited
capacity available.
And second, because blocking and
slowing down is done indiscriminately.
So this is not a violation
of the Dutch, uh,
law. And I think that's, um,
that sounds reasonable to me.
Your case is access, which is
kind of a brand of the telco Vodafone
and the content provider RTL.
Their offer is a subscription
where you can have
voice, text and Internet access
on your mobile phone.
And in addition to that, you can get an
app and an app allows you allows the
customers to watch Archil content
without charging the customers
Dataplan. So you get that RTL content
for free.
In other words, that's that's what
I call zero rate or sponsored
data.
That's a clear violation of net
neutrality, of course, both in the
principle and the under
the law in the Netherlands.
But the NRA's response to this one is
a bit curious.
And yet to say Vodafone will end this
violation by offering the service as a
separate service, which can be used
independent to the Internet access
service.
Um, so the NRA agrees that
this is a violation and something needs
to change.
Um, so this may proceed,
provided that the system is offered as a
separate service, they name
it, like it.
Um, so practically this means
that you as a consumer may
get a subscription where
you can get data, where you can get a
voice and text and you can
get the app and see the article content,
even if you don't have Internet access on
that subscription.
But it also means that if you have
a subscription where you have voice,
text and Internet access,
you also get this separate service
for free.
And that means that in the end, nothing
has changed because you have
subscriptions with full Internet access
and exit and RTL
app with content comes free.
So in my opinion,
this solution they
thought of is
not a real solution because
the violation is still intact.
So it's a horrible ruling.
And I've been told that, uh, the minister
of economic affairs wasn't amused
when they became aware of this ruling.
So what are the open debates?
Um, in the Netherlands,
the minister at the Ministry of Economic
Affairs is drafting a
new policy document which would
make some of those, uh,
uh, cases, which are not clear
now, which would, uh, clarify
those situations.
And, uh, there are
three topics which are mentioned in this
document.
First of all, the question, should
the ISP that is that
provides you with the, uh,
connection?
Should they do also IPV six,
should or should it be forced to provide
IPV six?
The government says it does not the case
because I before and IPV six is what
is used as a transport layer.
And net neutrality is only about
the services that are used that are
provided over this layer.
So, uh, IPV six would
not be a requirement if you have an
emergency.
The other thing they are discussing is
what exactly is a Internet access
service?
So that's the word that is used in the
law.
But it's not that doesn't have
a definition.
So, uh, they're are debating
on what is actually an Internet access
service.
So the Internet in a train, that's
a clear example. Everybody agrees that's
that's something which should be, um,
uh, where that majority should apply.
But for example, in a hotel,
that's a different case and they haven't
yet decided. I think this will invent
the Internet access in a hotel.
It will not be,
uh, have have well
applied.
And then this is
already mentioned.
So the and also what Thomas already
mentioned is you have these, um,
separate services manager service, single
services.
And I think that the, uh,
policy document that is drafted now will
provide more, um,
clear structure on that as well.
Yeah, now we go to yet
now we go to the global debate,
I think you may have noticed that
there was something going on in the US.
Verizon succeeded in
killing the old regulation about
neutrality in the US.
They just say that
this hinders their freedom of speech to
discriminate the content within
their networks.
And they actually got through with it and
they killed the old regulation that
the American regulator FCC
proposed.
And then this huge battle started in the
US where also, again, a lot
of civil society was engaged.
Our sister campaigns Internet.com
was revised.
Many civil society groups, as well as
Silicon Valley joined into the fight
because the new rules the FCC proposed
were really horrible, similarly to what
the Germans just sort of committed and
originally put forward.
And then also
things happened like John Oliver touched
the issue of net neutrality and his very
popular Daily Show.
And this all spiked and aggregated
so that around four million comments
were submitted to the consultation
Baffsky had put up for the
new rules.
And in general, we can say to
the question in the US really boils
down to public opinion
versus industry lobby.
There is no question about the public
opinion. Even in conservative
Republican circles, net neutrality
is seen as a good thing for
competition, for freedom of speech, for
various reasons.
But still, the industry lobby manages to
make it a political issue and still
delayed a decision.
And then Obama came
out and and like publicly said,
net neutrality is important and we
have to make it a law.
And the rules he proposed
in his statement also look really
fine, drafted like he understood the
problem and proposed a real solution.
But sadly, he is not the person to
decide. It's this guy
whom he appointed, Tom Wheeler,
the current chair of the
American Regulatory Authority FCC.
It's his decision whether or not we'll
have net neutrality in the US
or not.
And we'll
see, I guess, in 2015.
This decision will fall either way.
But it's definitely boils down to was
this public opinion versus industry
lobbying?
But it's not just the US and
the EU.
This debate is global
and particularly in Africa.
Net neutrality is a huge issue
because most people there don't have any
Internet access at all.
But what they sometimes have is
so-called Facebook zero, where
everything they have from the Internet is
just Facebook or Google
or Twitter, those big companies
that can afford to pay for
the data that the customers need to reach
them or to users need to reach them.
Those put up crazy stuff
like Zeppelins that get their Internet
from a satellite and then project
a GSM network in really rural
areas. They really take money in their
hands to bring Internet in rural areas,
but not really Internet, only their
services.
And so there is a huge
part of the population in some areas
which only has a
net, which only has disservices.
That's everything they know from the
Internet.
And this is really important.
If you look at development theory, I
mean, I'm an anthropologist
and this is a topic close to me.
What we are doing in the global south is
establishing new dependency circles.
We're making these economies dependent
on us, on our Western services.
We actively prevent local
services to come up startups in
Africa that come up with
the real needed services that the people
have. They are good examples for that.
Africa has established elaborate
SMS payment and information systems,
as is often the only means of
communication that people have in a
chronically. And still they managed
to compensate
with these tools the fact that
most Africans don't have bank accounts.
So there is a real need for modern
telecommunications technology in this
continent. That's still the way to
society is making global south even
more dependent to Western companies.
And this is
similarly, in a way, the case in Asia
where also exhilarating is really common.
But the net neutrality debate is not.
South Korea's the only country that has
legislation on this topic
and it's not really good.
And in general, the
net neutrality paradigm is not really
widespread in Asia,
differently so in Latin America.
As I mentioned before, Sheila was the
first country to
make a law about net neutrality and
actually a quite good one.
It was copied by eBay people and Ecuador
recently. Also, Brazil adopted the civil
constitutional law about Internet,
which also includes provision about net
neutrality.
And also Mexico recently
put a law forward, which is not good, but
still they did something on this topic.
So Latin America is a really interesting
area when it comes to
net neutrality.
I know the final thing I want to mention
is probably something a little bit
heated, but I feel really strongly about
it and I want to speak out about it.
We all love Wikipedia and
but sadly, there is a stain on that love,
at least for me, Wikipedia.
There is a product of
Wikipedia. It's a project which to run
where they do exactly the same as
Facebook. Basically, they pay for
the data that, Audy,
they make agreements with ISPs.
There's actually no money flowing, but
they make agreements with ISPs so
that Wikipedia is excluded from any
data charges.
So if I have a feature phone
and I have only a contract worth a few
Assam's and a few minutes per
month, I can I can phone with somebody
and I have no Internet.
I can still see Wikipedia, I can
still edit Wikipedia,
but that's the only thing I see from the
Internet.
Of course, they're doing this to foster
the sum of all human knowledge.
They want to get their market, their
service out there to more people like
Facebook. They see that only one billion
people is in the Internet, but
they're much more people in the world.
And so why don't we try to reach those
ultimately is also about brand
establishing themselves
in these new markets,
which will soon have Internet
and hopefully will develop.
But imagine if Encyclopedia
Britannica had a service
like this 10 years ago.
Something like Wikipedia never could
have come into existence because
there would already be one incumbent
player that's hugely dominant, that
has a free
access to all the customer base, and
it doesn't matter if it's the best
service, but it's free.
And so people will use that.
And Wikipedia is a community
project. Never would have
taken off and come to the point where
they are right now.
So the reason
I mean, this is all known for for quite
some time, but the reason why I wanted
to to mention this here is because
of this letter,
Jila
amended its net neutrality law to
prohibit price discrimination zero
rating. They want to outlaw that as well.
And Wikimedia
Media actively engaged in the policy
debate in Scheeler and fought
this amendment, fought civil rights
legislation to
keep loopholes in there that would allow
them to offer Wikipedia zero.
And this was the tipping point for me
where I thought this
is not going in the right direction.
If a public
FundaciÃ³n actively engages in
a policy battle abroad in another country
to fight good legislation
that has been pushed for by civil
society, we really have a problem
we have to talk about.
And also, even if we accept the basic
premise that Wikipedia is a good thing,
it's hard to question whether cheater's
the right country for it because Chile is
not Africa.
In Chile, you have to spend like two
percent of your monthly income to
afford a mobile prepaid Internet
subscription.
That similarly to Denmark.
And now we are not speaking of a country
where there is no Internet in average.
Four hundred people in Chile, they have
130 mobile subscriptions.
So we're not speaking of
a developing country still.
I've been at Wikimania and I've talked
with people from the foundation that are
tasked with dealing these things and
they are country criteria for which
countries Wikipedia is considered or not.
They said they would publish them.
Actually, so far they've done
nothing.
And think to to end this
debate, we have to go back to the
vision statement of the Wikipedia
Foundation.
Imagine a world in which every single
human being can freely share the sum
of all knowledge.
This is our commitment, and I'm
questioning whether the sum of all
knowledge can only be one service of the
Internet, because what you're doing
is also they are opening the floodgates.
Facebook zero is right behind them.
Once Wikipedia is established in a
country, there is no way you can prevent
Facebook zero from following
on the steps.
And so we really have
to look at the larger picture here,
whether we want to continue
in this direction and also have to
say that there is a battle within
Wikimedia and it's mostly the foundation
and some lawyers within the foundation
that are pushing for this
on on local chapters.
It might look differently.
So for time constraints, I'm going to do
this quick, rather quickly,
so remember at the beginning, I was
talking about the two things
you should remember when you leaving
this room.
The first thing was ordinary citizens
putting energy on the political agenda
before and we need to do that again.
So that's what Thomas discussed
about the European legislation.
If we want net neutrality
enshrined in European law, then
we you need to get in touch
with your ministries
in your member state,
because only that will
make them convinced that the people
that you think
is important.
So you need to so you can do that.
So go to the website, save the
Internet to the EU and
help make this point.
If you want to do more,
get in touch with your
regional national digital civil rights
organization and do and help them
with whatever you're good at.
And if you can't spend any time,
do a donation and help them financially.
The other thing I
mentioned in the beginning was there are
unsolved issues and civil society needs
your expertize.
So one of those unsolved issues is
the one that goes on,
uh, the problem with, uh,
peering and transit's and
not going into details on that now.
But if you want to help, think with
us on that, then come to
Noisey Square tomorrow at 5:00
where we have a workshop and where
we will discuss that problem
for now.
Question everything.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Even though it took longer than
initially planned, we still have
quite some time for questions.
Let's start here in the MIKE three
and then go to the Internet.
Yeah, there's a couple of things
which are quite important for network
networking as well as
first, you want to have a level
playing field, not just on the IP
level, but also also on the fiber.
So I think
probably some of you already know
stock up, which is in stock.
They have a municipality
owned parabolic
operator that's like
10 years ago already
that it was very common in Stockholm.
Look at the fiber to home
at that time.
It was 100 megabits or something like
that. But that's
kind of critical.
Also, if you look at the US market,
the Google Fiber is doing the same
thing over there
that
I had some other plots as well.
But the letter there's also
the complaint that the operators always
keep complaining about
how they can't profitably run
something.
It's important to tell them that, OK,
fine, we give the job to somebody
else because
not just the fiber, but just about every
every service you can.
If you level the playing field, there
will be someone who wants that market.
And at the moment, for
the Deutsche Telekom tells you that they
can't do it, then in
the process, you can also screw them,
screw the telecom, which
is very big benefit.
OK, that's let's
think of an answer.
Can it please remind everybody who
is leaving?
Be quiet.
Thank you.
OK, just one question, one
comment about what you said and
particularly mentioned in Stockholm.
Personally, just as a note, I think
functional separation is something we
should aim for.
And I would like to see functional
separation in the political
programs of political parties,
because that's honestly the only real
solution for the competition problem.
As long as a company owns
the infrastructure and also provides the
extra service over it, there will be no
real competition.
Only if you separate those two,
you can really adequately assess
the cost of infrastructure investment.
You can have a logical decision
about where to invest in infrastructure
and you have a race to the top instead
of to the bottom when it comes to
offering the maximum bandwidth
technically possible.
No question from the Internet.
Yeah, there's one question
whether there is collaboration
sort with the Internet society
I usoc to gain people
power for Brussels.
Particularly access now is working
on this field with the
international Internet bodies.
There's also the
Net Neutrality Coalition, which was
founded to more
foster the academic debate, but also
close to the ATF and similar
bodies.
And there has been talk about
establishing net neutrality as a basic
principle on a UN level.
But these are all long term programs
and usually they don't kick back
towards the real hard
national or supranational policy debates
that we have in Europe or in the US.
Definitely for the long term.
I think this is something we have to look
at, but short, medium term,
I think not much will happen there.
Now on microphone one, please.
Thank you very much, thank you for your
talk and thank you for the great work
already done for the European Parliament.
Now, the fight is in the council.
That means that the fight is in all of
the European member states.
The problem is that we need to
organize the fight that you did in the
Netherlands for each national
state. How do we how
do we do that? How do we engage
consumer organizations and
make this about competition, equal
markets and consumers?
Because they weren't part of
the organizations that you mentioned that
we actually established an answer to
that.
It's a global coalition on net
neutrality,
which is a network of NGOs all around
the world that care about net neutrality.
A good example is recently in Tunis,
an ISP proposed new products,
which is very similar to the ones that
KPN ISP in the Netherlands proposed,
that that kind of pushed a debate towards
the point where the net neutrality law
was established.
And because we had this global network,
we could provide to local Tunisian
NGO with all the information,
all the arguments, all the materials they
needed to quickly
respond to this threat.
So this is a global debate and we'll
see it pop up in many more countries.
And I think only global collaboration
and information sharing and open
source can help to really
win this battle because the other side
has so much more money than we.
So and in addition to that,
has already mentioned during the during
talk that we the council,
that's a problem which is not limited to
net neutrality debate only.
So I think that the NGOs
in Europe need to make an
effort there and see and see how we
can do this better.
And so, for instance,
it's fairly easy. We are a fairly
professional organization, but
it's not just about Netherlands.
It's also about other countries where
other member states, where they have
less organized, where there's less
organized organizations.
So I'm not
sure what the answer
is to your question, but it's definitely
a hard one and definitely one we need to
fix.
Now back to my three
comments on the train, they could just
survive the bandwidth limits.
But my question is there
is any exemptions for emergencies
in 08, for example, because
on the traditional
face calls, it don't you
don't even need a subscription or even
a SIM card in your phone
to call them services.
So the exemptions like that around.
And what about
the costs pricing to things differently
based on the cost of providing the
service, for example?
Could I give a larger one megabit,
100 megabits, even a cable
to my to make they take their third
line, but the
deluxe is much
faster speeds because local
traffic is much cheaper to provide.
So can local traffic be high
bandwidth?
The scale could apply to interplanetary
traffic as well.
Well, that example.
So I'm not sure whether I understand the
question correctly, but if it is that
you could make a difference in
in a subscription for a local traffic
and, um, and have a
different price attached to that
compared to traffic, which nonlocal
then?
I think that is not a good idea.
But and it would not work for the,
uh, within the Dutch rules we have
now.
Now, but I'm not sure if that if
if I gave an answer to your question
and make cannot attempt
to answer what I understood.
I mean, we had this
net neutrality legislation doesn't
prohibit you from,
for example, prioritizing emergency
numbers or also to like
if you have SNH sessions, which you need
to administer that infrastructure.
Those, of course, can be prioritized.
Um, these things which which
fulfill a purpose
and Udaan implement
its purpose application agnostic.
So to all providers and protocols
which will fill this purpose, then it's
totally in line with net neutrality.
Um, application agnostic.
You can do a lot of things, particularly
when it comes to that and to it to the
payment part.
I was not totally sure what you mean.
It's definitely not in line with net
neutrality that you pay
according to the geographical
distance, the data is flowing or what?
I mean, of course, an ISP can
differentiate themselves from
the bandwidth they are offering you to
access technology they are offering you.
These things are allocates.
It starts getting critical when you look
inside the data stream and you make a
difference between the
service that you actually use in
this pipe.
I don't know an answer, but
I can adjust
stiffly for different pipes and then
backtrack so
that.
No.
No, no, and
usually you have, like, the abstractedly,
you often don't know which which
local physical pipe any connection
will run through and within one session,
the actual physical route that
it's taking can change.
So this would not work.
Time is getting close to an end, but
microphone three, please.
I am working for a small ISP,
actually, and we
fully support net neutrality.
And you took
the answer to my question right now.
My question is,
if we
take our pictures straight,
are pictures equally, then
maybe voice over IP calls may get
some bad connections.
And if you would implement
quality of service for this, would this
fulfill the mind
of net neutrality or
would it be something's
broken?
Yeah.
So remember
the explanatory memorandum I showed in
the beginning that tells
what the goal is of the
Dutch net neutrality law?
So the goal is, again,
to maximize the freedom of speech,
the freedom of
the Internet user.
So with that in mind,
doing quality of service
to a certain extent is acceptable
because it will, uh,
uh, improve this freedom.
If you would not apply the
scale of your service, then, uh,
the freedom would deter a..
So, for example, uh, voice
over IP, uh, it's
very helpful to do some
quality of service there because
otherwise you can't make a call, um,
and doing the quality of service you
provided. You do this for all for
the same way that will help freedom.
So that will be OK.
And one last question
from microphone to please.
Well, the question is more like a comment
I've seen.
I think you did the talk last year on
this one read.
Well, back then it seemed like everything
is doomed and nothing can be changed
anymore. And that was quite a surprise
coming in here today and hearing all this
stuff, because my sort of
my attention drifted away from it.
And I wanted to say is like, thank you
for whatever you did.
It's just magic that it's happened to be
like this right now.
So, again, it's not what we did
or did. Not only it's what you did.
Yes. Because all of you went
to. Right.
Went to safety Internet you
and send a fax to the members
of parliament and that made a change.
And if you didn't, you have to do it now,
unfortunately.
That's all the time we have.
So, once again, thank you for
your talk and for your input
and the political work of everybody here.