Last week, the Dutch parliament passed a wide-ranging network neutrality bill that attempts to bring the country’s largest wireless operator to heel. If it clears the Senate as expected, the Dutch proposal will become the first such law adopted in Europe.
Incumbent telco KPN, now privatized, announced earlier this year a new plan to rebuild slumping revenues from voice calls and text messaging: charge more to users of Internet VoIP services and instant messaging apps. To make the scheme work, KPN would use deep packet inspection to monitor and classify all subscriber Internet traffic, singling out the protocols or apps it chose and billing more for those bits.
The audacious scheme went too far even for Europe, which has long prided itself on using ISP competition—rather than regulation—as the main way to prevent abuse. Maxime Verhagen, the Minister of Economic Affairs, Agriculture, and Innovation, quickly announced in parliament a plan to ban the practice, and parliament approved the ban last week.
According to a translation of the text from Dutch advocacy group Bits of Freedom, the bill requires ISPs not to:
Hinder or slow down applications and services on the internet, unless and to the extent that the measure in question with which applications or services are being hindered or slowed down is necessary:
a. to minimize the effects of congestion, whereby equal types of traffic should be treated equally;
b. to preserve the integrity and security of the network and service of the provider in question or the terminal of the enduser;
c. to restrict the transmission to an enduser of unsolicited communication as refered to in Article 11.7, first paragraph, provided that the enduser has given its prior consent;
d. to give effect to a legislative provision or court order.
The bill also demands that ISPs not “make the price of the rates for Internet access services dependent on the services and applications which are offered or used via these services.”
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