Net neutrality update July 2017

12th July 2017 was a day of action to protest against plans to repeal net neutrality rules introduced under the Obama administration in the US. Facebook, Google, Twitter, Reddit and others displayed banners, alerts, ads and short videos urging opposition to the overturn of the 2015 net neutrality rules. Some telecoms companies and organisations posted messages in support of the repeal, expressing agreement with and support for net neutrality principles, but describing the current rules as needlessly complex over-regulation: see an examples from the NCTA , Verizon, AT&T and Comcast.

See coverage from the Telegraph, Reuters and BBC News. See this previous post for more background to the protest and also see these overviews from BBC News and Sky News. Also see filings to the Federal Communications Commission’s Restoring Internet Freedom Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM, more background here) by NCTA, the Internet Association and the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), as well as further commentary from Reuters, which also reported later in the month that a congressional committee had asked for input from Google parent Alphabet, Facebook, Comcast, Amazon  and other major companies on the net neutrality rules.

Other net neutrality news this month:

• Ars Technica and The Verge reported on Verizon’s testing to optimize the performance of video applications on its network, which appeared to throttle video traffic to 10Mbit/s.
• Three’s new ‘Go Binge’ service allows customers to watch and listen to popular services including Netflix, TVPlayer, SoundCloud and Deezer, without counting towards their data allowances (zero-rating).
• Analysys Mason suggested that to implement 5G network slicing in the European Union, operators will need to work closely with regulators to find an efficient way to agree that the enhanced quality of service (QoS) is necessary, to monitor the performance of Internet access services, and to understand whether slices cause any detrimental impact on that performance. Network slicing is a form of network virtualisation in which different services with different needs can be provided with different performance characteristics (such as latency, priority, or throughput) on a single physical network.
• Speaking at the Digital-born Media Carnival in Montenegro, Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC) Chair for 2017 Sebastien Soriano emphasised that European rules on net neutrality can no longer be rebutted and that national regulators and BEREC should make sure that the rules are properly and consistently implemented across Europe.
• The European Commission published annual country open internet reports from national regulators; see this previous post for details of Ofcom’s UK report.