Policy Observatory

After the European Parliament voted to protect net neutrality in April of last year, the EU Council of Ministers has just adopted its text on net neutrality (pdf)*. It claims to aim to defend the open internet, but would, in fact, permit every imaginable breach of net neutrality.

Today U.S. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler confirmed that the agency will move to pass strong Net Neutrality protections later this month. Any action by Congress to roll back FCC authority or threaten common carrier status for broadband providers will meet thunderous opposition, by U.S. users as well as international communities.

Chairman Wheeler’s statement signals that the FCC could soon put its full enforcement power to work to protect the open internet for close to 300 million users—and countering the threats that blocking, “fast lanes,” and throttling of content and services pose to human rights like free expression and privacy online. In Chairman Wheeler’s own words, “These enforceable, bright-line rules will ban paid prioritization, and the blocking and throttling of lawful content and services."

A U.S. appeals court upheld the Obama administration's landmark rules barring internet service providers from obstructing or slowing down consumer access to web content. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit backed the Federal Communications Commission's so-called net neutrality rules put in place last year to make internet service providers treat all internet traffic equally.

BEREC, the Body of European Regulators of Electronic Communications must publish new rules on net neutrality by 30 August, which leaves them little time to process the hundreds of thousands of responses.

New net neutrality guidelines from the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC) confirm strong protection for net neutrality, and for the free and open internet, in the European Union. 

In June 2016 the Broadband Stakeholder Group (a multi-stakeholder industry advisory group to Government) published its new Open Internet Code. This is signed up to by all major UK ISPs and MNOs, and is a self-regulatory set of commitments on open internet that complement the EU Regulation. It forms an update and merger of the previous existing two self-regulatory codes on open internet and traffic management.