The European Parliament has passed the flawed compromise text
on net neutrality without including any of the amendments that would
have closed serious loopholes. The vote, with 500 in favour, and 163
against, took place in a plenary session a few hours after a rather
lacklustre debate this morning, which was attended by only 50 MEPs out
of the European Parliament's total of 751, indicating little interest in
this key topic among most European politicians. The Greens MEP Jan
Philipp Albrecht called the final result a "dirty deal."
Arguments in favour of the text were disappointing and superficial.
Many concentrated on the other major component of the Telecoms Single
Market package, the abolition of mobile roaming charges in the EU.
This long-overdue, and highly-popular measure was cleverly offered as a
carrot by the Council of the EU and the European Commission in order to
persuade MEPs to accept the rest of the package. The misleading
impression was given that supporting the net neutrality amendments
proposed by MEPs would cause the abolition of roaming charges to be
lost, but that was not the case.
As the German Pirate Party MEP Julia Reda pointed out,
the Telecoms Single Market package doesn't even deliver on roaming:
"The plan to place an end to roaming surcharges in Europe has been
adopted pending a review of pricing and consumption patterns. Even if
the review is completed by the 15 June 2017 deadline, roaming surcharges
will only be suspended up to a ‘fair use’ limit beyond which they still
apply and continue to hinder the breaking down of barriers within
Europe." In other words, those MEPs who voted in favour of the package
in the belief that accepting poor net neutrality rules was a price worth
paying in order to buy a speedy end to EU roaming charges were played
for mugs.
On the few occasions that MEPs supporting the compromise text
addressed the net neutrality rules directly, they simply parroted the
claim by telecom companies that specialised services running over fast
lanes were needed in order to encourage innovation in the EU. As those
in favour of true net neutrality—including such luminaries as Sir Tim Berners-Lee—have
emphasised, the opposite is true. For innovation to flourish as it has
done so far, a level playing-field is needed. Allowing fast and slow
lanes on the Internet plays into the hands of incumbents and companies
with deep pockets.
Pressure was applied at the end of the morning's debate by Andrus
Ansip, the vice-commissioner responsible for the EU Digital Market. He
said that if the text was not passed in its entirety now, there was "a
risk of delays, not only months, but years," and that "risk" may have
weighed with some MEPs. But Reda pointed out on Twitter that is not true:
"Actually it's only 6 weeks until 3rd reading," when a new compromise
text could have been agreed. One other reason MEPs may have been
unwilling to change the text was that it has been going back and forth
between the various institutions of the EU for years, and MEPs are
evidently sick of discussing it, as the poor turn-out for the earlier
debate showed. In the end, sheer political fatigue may have played a
major part in undermining net neutrality in the EU.
However, the battle is not quite over. As Anne Jellema, CEO of the Web Foundation, which was established by Berners-Lee in 2009, notes in her response to today's EU vote:
"The European Parliament is essentially tossing a hot potato to the
Body of European Regulators, national regulators and the courts, who
will have to decide how these spectacularly unclear rules will be
implemented. The onus is now on these groups to heed the call of
hundreds of thousands of concerned citizens and prevent a two-speed
Internet."
