europaeum

I just wanted to answer the first few questions on the European Commission’s most recent green paper “on the open internet and net neutrality”. As part of the Neelie Kroes’ Digital Agenda this a crucial issue that more and more people around Europe become aware of. If you’re unfamiliar with why net neutrality matters I recommend watching Jérémie Zimmermann’s introduction at last year’s Chaos Communication Congress (26c3) or reading the dossier and information provided at La Quadrature du Net.

I welcome the European Commission reaching out to the many experts and interested to collect their views on the matter. It does so usually by opening a public consultation process in the form of a green paper allowing everyone to comment on the Commission thoughts and answer some of the questions that the Commission itself will have to answer in a later process, ideally with a concrete proposal. If the Commission really cares about citizens’ involvement it even provides serveral translations of that paper. Not so much recently, unfortunately.

“This questionnaire is intended to contribute to the debate on the open internet and net neutrality in Europe and to feed into the report which the Commission aims to present to the European Parliament and Council before the end of the year in accordance with its Declaration (in Annex I) made in the context of the adoption by the European Parliament and Council of the telecoms reform package in November of last year.”

Point 1 of the Questionnaire for the public consultation on the open internet and net neutrality in Europe (PDF)

Interestingly enough the answer shall “feed” into the Commission’s report. I like that term. At least here in the internet it suggests that information is made accessible very easily, using the latest technology. But what I still do not get is why the green paper is  just a simple PDF file. Admittedly, I understand that this topic can become very fast very complex. Still, why isn’t the Commission making use of current technology.

Many students have to collect answers for projects and papers. Every week I obtain another invitation to contribute to a survey. Almost everytime it links to a webpage where I can answer online and simply submit it to the person. Sometimes these questionnaires include further information, hyperlinks and background information making it easier for me to answer as wished. That’s the stuff the internet can do. Moreover it’s highly convenient for those asking the questions to collect that many answers. If they use of the many online services, they can export the questions bundled to topics, get graphical results and many other helpful tools to better understand what people submitted. Setting up such a service takes only few minutes. Perhaps a bit more if you programme and host it yourself but still it’s not huge work. I can do it, so why can’t the European commission. I cannot think of legal implications the prevent it to do so. Mostly you don’t even have to tell so much about yourself apart from maybe name, organisation (if any) and e-mail address.

I’ll be answering the questions anyway. I will write them down in my OpenOffice document, will create a PDF file, will send it by e-mail. I wonder what happens in Brussels, when they receive the e-mail, print the document, try to aggregate my answers and those of the others and do what ever they do.

By the way, these are the 15 questions raised by the European Commission. English only. But you don’t have to answer every single question. Every contribution counts to help make the European internet open and neutral. You can do so by September, 30th.

1. Is there currently a problem of net neutrality and the openness of the internet in Europe?  If so, illustrate with concrete examples. Where are the bottlenecks, if any? Is the problem such that it cannot be solved by the existing degree of competition in fixed and mobile access markets?
2. How might problems arise in future? Could these emerge in other parts of the internet value chain? What would the causes be?
3. Is the regulatory framework capable of dealing with the issues identified, including in relation to monitoring/assessment and subsequent enforcement?
4. To what extent is traffic management necessary from an operators’ point of view? How is it carried out in practice? What technologies are used to carry out such traffic management?
5. To what extent will net neutrality concerns be allayed by the provision of transparent information to end users, which distinguishes between managed services on the one hand and services offering access to the public internet on a ‘best efforts’ basis, on the other?
6. Should the principles governing traffic management be the same for fixed and mobile networks?
7. What other forms of prioritisation are taking place? Do content and application providers also try to prioritise their services? If so, how – and how does this prioritisation affect other players in the value chain?
8. In the case of managed services, should the same quality of service conditions and parameters be available to all content/application/online service providers which are in the same situation? May exclusive agreements between network operators and content/application/online service providers create problems for achieving that objective?
9. If the objective referred to in Question 8 is retained, are additional measures needed to achieve it? If so, should such measures have a voluntary nature (such as, for example, an industry code of conduct) or a regulatory one?
10. Are the commercial arrangements that currently govern the provision of access to the internet adequate, in order to ensure that the internet remains open and that infrastructure investment is maintained? If not, how should they change?
11. What instances could trigger intervention by national regulatory authorities in setting minimum quality of service requirements on an undertaking or undertakings providing public communications services?
12. How should quality of service requirements be determined, and how could they be monitored?
13. In the case where NRAs find it necessary to intervene to impose minimum quality of service requirements, what form should they take, and to what extent should there be co-operation between NRAs to arrive at a common approach?
14. What should transparency for consumers consist of? Should the standards currently applied be further improved?
15. Besides the traffic management issues discussed above, are there any other concerns affecting freedom of expression, media pluralism and cultural diversity on the internet? If so, what further measures would be needed to safeguard those values?