Net neutrality will be upheld promises European competition commissioner

In a recent statement the European competition commissioner has vowed that in order to uphold the principle of net neutrality he will make use of every regulation available to him.

The implementation and enforcing of net neutrality in Europe is something that the European competitions commissioner feels is very important and in during a conference in Madrid recently the vice president of the European Commission responsible for competition policy, Joaquin Almunia told an audience consisting of economists and telecoms executive “The commission is committed to preserving the open and neutral character of the internet in Europe. I will intervene every time the conduct of a dominant operator causes harm to competition and consumers.”

The principle behind net neutrality is that network operators should apply their best efforts to ensure that every legal data packet that travels across the internet should be transmitted equally. Any kind of discrimination against data packets by network operators, under any circumstances, would prove to be highly detrimental to business and consumers alike as it would stifle any kind of innovation by preventing the entry of application and content providers according to groups that are in favour of net neutrality.

Discrimination against some types of data traffic is, unfortunately, something that most operators are already doing with peer-to-peer traffic slowed down to provide better speeds for other data and the filtering of malware and spam data. The current congestion on mobile networks makes it far more prone to data discrimination with data traffic shaping often being used by mobile network operators.

Almunia did, however concede that this would be the limit the commission would tolerate saying “Operators can always differentiate data to guarantee quality of service or to protect their networks from congestion and security threats. But, apart from these forms of maintenance, I will not accept practices that distort competition and discriminate among market players.”

Source – Computing