14 DAY TRIAL // The Netherlands has become the first country in Europe and only the second in the world to pass Net Neutrality legislation. The new law forces ISPs to treat all traffic equally and, crucially, also prevents them from peering too much into what the users are sending and receiving via their networks.
There's been plenty of talk around the world about this type of legislation, but it's a controversial subject, not least because ISPs, copyright-dependent companies, police and government agencies and so on, don't want anything like this ever becoming law.
Rather, they say people should just trust them to do the right thing and that they should be free to alter their service in any way they want.
Normally, laws and regulation do more harm than good, in a working free market system, competition keeps companies honest, or at least keeps them striving to offer a better service than their competitors.
The reality though is that, in many parts of the world, ISPs, and this includes mobile carriers, enjoy a de facto monopoly, by carving up the market between competitors. The best case scenario is a duopoly where "choice" is only on paper.
The Dutch law has some good provisions and shouldn't have too many unforeseen consequences. Though they're called "unforeseen" consequences for a reason.
The new law only allows ISPs to shape traffic in the case of congestion or for security reasons and only if it's in the interest of the subscriber. This should mean that there can't be any app or service specific limiting or boosting of traffic, for example slowing down BitTorrent downloads or YouTube videos.
But the law goes deeper, it also prevents ISPs from disconnecting subscribers for anything other than them not paying their bills or if they provide false information about themselves. The target here is clear, ISPs will not be able to terminate a contract for things such as piracy or anything like that, even if they want to.
Finally, the law prevents ISPs from doing deep packet inspection, aka analyzing the contents of the data packets travelling through their pipes, or any other type of wiretapping technique, unless they have a warrant or user consent. Overall, they seem like very sensible requirements and should serve as an example to any other country.