14 DAY TRIAL // The European Parliament voted today on a series of crucial laws regarding telecommunications, and instead of showing the world how it's done, it decided to give leeway to corporations by rejecting important clauses that would have established Net Neutrality and completely eliminated roaming surcharges.
According to Julia Reda, Member of the European Parliament for the Pirate Party and of the Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee, the EU Parliament decided it was best to take a middle route when it came to these important decisions, instead of doing what most users fervently asked during the past days, via emails, letters, tweets, and calls to their elected officials.
Europe won't have Net Neutrality
In the form they are today, Internet access laws included with the Telecoms Single Market package allow ISPs to establish zero-rating services, which will not count against traffic quotas, for which they can allocate a primary-use, faster bandwidth.
This means that deep-pocketed corporations like Google, Apple, or Facebook, can enter legal agreements with ISPs and make sure their services are not only faster to users but also, more importantly, faster than their competition.
As you can imagine, this practice is bordering on the legal limit of monopoly laws, and will allow ISPs the power to pick and choose what content is delivered at what speed.
Roaming surcharges are eliminated, kind of
Besides the clauses that allowed the aforementioned Net Neutrality loopholes, the EU Parliament also voted on another law included in Telecoms Single Market package, one which removes roaming surcharges.
But don't get excited because that law, which was highly publicized in the EU, isn't what you'd think it is. The law comes with clauses that allow telcos to re-add the roaming charges later on if the user passes over a "fair use" limit of roaming data.
Julia Reda described the vote on this law package as a "broken promise" from EU officials, who for the last year have advertised it as a welcome reform to the EU telecommunications sector.