Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-12-11-Speech-2-312"
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"en.20071211.38.2-312"2
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"The question raised by the honourable Member is very important for consumers, telecom service providers and content providers, and of course also for telecom regulators. It concerns a balance between network providers’ desire to offer differential qualities of service for internet services, in order to optimise the use of its network resources, and the freedom of users to distribute or access any legal on-line content without interference such as blocking or degrading.
These issues are under constant analysis, are constantly monitored and are discussed regularly with Member States, for instance in the i2010 High Level Group, and with third countries. This is important, because the internet does not have borders. The Commission will promote continuously the need for an open internet and for non-discriminatory access. This is what underpins the philosophy of the regulatory approach under the EU telecom rules, which will be further enhanced by our reform project, to be discussed in Parliament in the coming months.
The Commission is committed to keeping the internet open both for service providers wanting to deliver new, innovative services and for consumers wanting to access the services they choose and to create and upload contents themselves.
The ongoing debate in the United States on net neutrality is strongly influenced by the lack of regulation in the US to ensure that access is kept open, and, combined with the concentration of network ownership, the lack of access regulation has provoked real concerns among consumers and content providers that there could be foreclosure of the internet.
The situation in Europe is that we are generally in a good position with regard to net neutrality and net freedoms, because we have effective network regulation in line with EU telecom rules, and European consumers have a greater choice of broadband services providers. The fact that consumers have more choice and there is more competition means that, if one supplier seeks to restrict user rights, then another can enter the market with a more open offer. The current EU regulatory framework has so far ensured that the telecom market remains open, that offers made to consumers are transparent and that competition is effective.
I understand the honourable Member’s question, because there is a risk that in the future a prioritisation of traffic may increasingly be introduced. In the past, all information, packets and bits of data were treated equally. But today new techniques can differentiate between packets, in order to award priority to high urgency communications or to users who have paid a premium for higher-quality services.
These techniques are legitimate in cases where service levels have to be guaranteed in order for the service to be effective. Voice-over internet services, for example, need a basic minimum level of connection in order to be satisfactory, especially for emergency or business calls. In addition, prioritisation creates an incentive mechanism for network operators to invest in upgrading bandwidth as demand increases. That is the nice part of the story. The problem is that the same techniques could be utilised to degrade the quality of service to unacceptably low levels. Such discrimination might then lead to sub-standard services for consumers and alternative providers.
That is why, in the telecom reform package, which was adopted by the Commission on 13 November 2007 and presented to Parliament that same day, we proposed to give national telecom regulators the power to set minimum quality levels for network transmission services based on technical standards identified at EU level. In addition, there is now a new requirement in the telecom rules to indicate to users in advance any techniques that have been implemented and which could lead to prioritisation. That is what we call the transparency rule.
We as a Commission believe that this approach strikes a balance that will safeguard competition and user access, without unduly restricting the ability of network providers to experiment with different business models.
In addition to this, Parliament knows that the Commission is closely monitoring developments as regards net freedoms. Following the 2006 World Summit on the Information Society, we presented to Parliament a communication which clearly stated the Commission’s intention to monitor and safeguard the neutrality of the internet. The architectural principles of an open internet and end-to-end connectivity are also explicitly mentioned in the Council conclusions from 2005."@en1
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