council of europe

The Council of Europe has today issued a set of “network neutrality guidelines” that call for mobile and broadband providers to treat Internet traffic equally, without discrimination or restriction, and for member states (e.g. UK) to support this via the “development of national legal frameworks“. The new guidelines follow last year’s agreement to introduce a new Net Neutrality law, although this time around the language appears to be somewhat stricter. Never the less there are still some caveats, such as to allow Internet security services (anti-spam/virus filtering etc.), support websites blocked via court orders and for general traffic management measures (when needed to tackle network congestion). The Broadband Stakeholders Group, which manages the related Open Internet and Traffic Management Codes of Practice for UK providers, recently completed a review of its code and opted not to make any major changes. In fairness their voluntary code was already fairly similar to what Europe has proposed to implement. One potential conflict area could be with the UK Government’s drive to force network-level filtering (Parental Control) services on to Internet providers. So far most ISPs get around any Net Neutrality concerns on this front by offering adult content blocking as an optional service during sign-up, but not all of them take the same approach. Sky Broadband recently announced its intention to adopt a default-on approach to Internet filtering that would conflict with the new EU stance and the Government are even considering a law change in order to support this (here). Otherwise here’s a summary of the Council’s recommendation for a new net neutrality framework. EU Net Neutrality Guidelines (Framework Recommendation) 1. General principles 1.1. Internet users have the right to freedom of expression, including the right to receive and impart information, by using services, applications and devices of their choice, in full compliance with Article 10 of the [...]