EDRi's answer on BEREC's Net Neutrality consultation

EDRi has answered the BEREC Consultation on Net Neutrality that ended on
31 July 2012, underlining that BEREC, the European Commission and
national telecom regulators should be acting to stop the Net
neutrality breaches and to ensure that services failing to maintain
open access to the Internet, should not be able to refer to themselves
as Internet access services.

EDRi welcomed BEREC’s commitment to provide further guidance on
net neutrality in order to maintain an open and competitive internet in
Europe and to address the increasingly urgent question of how digital
technology can be kept free and open. The answer of the organisation
tackled issues in the BEREC’s three guidelines on Quality of Service
(BoR 32), IP-interconnection (BoR 33) and differentiation practices (BoR
31).

Following the arguments presented, EDRi thinks that BEREC’s guidance on
net neutrality should be based on the following major six principles:

1.The Internet must be kept and open. Reachability between all end
points connected to the Internet, without any form of restriction must
be maintained.

2. All forms of discriminatory traffic management, such as blocking or
throttling should be prohibited.

3. Traffic management should only be allowed as narrowly tailored
deviations from the rule. This must be either technically necessary or
to address a transient network management problem which cannot otherwise
be addressed.

4. Use of deep packet inspection (and re-use of associated data) should
be reviewed by national data protection regulators to assess compliance
with the EU’s data protection and fundamental rights framework. By
default, only header information should be use for traffic management.

5. Accessible, complete information on traffic management practices and
justifications must be published.

6. Non-neutral treatment of traffic for “voluntary” law enforcement by
intermediaries’ purposes must be prohibited unless there is a legal
basis in the country where the restriction is being implemented.

EDRi’s response to the NN Consultation (31.07.2012)
https://edri.org/files/2012EDRi_position_BEREC_NetNeutrality.pdf

EDRi-gram: A new Net Neutrality EC consultation delays possible regulations (1.08.2012)
https://edri.org/edrigram/number10.15/another-net-neutrality-consultation