SF Gate quotes Professor Barbara van Schewick on the impact of recent European net neutrality rulings. 

Europe just dealt a major blow to net neutrality.

On Tuesday afternoon, the European Parliament voted against all amendments to a package on the European single market for electronic communications — raising fears among activists, tech companies, and NGOs that the proposals as they currently stand fail to properly protect net neutrality.

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Four key problems.

In a blog post published last week, Stanford law professor Barbara van Schewick laid out what she says are the four key problems with the European Parliament’s proposed rules. These are:

“The proposal allows ISPs to create fast lanes for companies that pay through the specialized services exception.” This exemption is intended for “specialized services” — like medical data, say — but van Schewick argues that the exception is “too broad,” and that “in many cases, it still allows ISPs to offer fast lanes by calling them a specialized service.

“The proposal generally allows zero-rating and gives regulators very limited ability to police it, leaving users and companies without protection against all but the most egregious cases.” If a service is zero-rated, it doesn’t count towards a users’ bandwidth cap or usage costs. This means companies could pay ISPs to be zero-rated — once again creating an unequal internet.

“The proposal allows ISPs to define classes and speed up or slow down traffic in those classes, even if there is no congestion.” ISPs could still choose to discriminate against certain kinds of data (like peer-to-peer torrenting, for example). Van Schewick worries that because ISPs will not be able to identify what “class” encrypted data fits in, they will simply put them in the slowest lane — as has happened before. This will discourage the use of encryption, and make the internet less secure.

“The proposal allows ISPs to start managing congestion in the case of impending congestion. That means that they can slow down traffic anytime, not just during times of actual congestion.” Van Schewick thinks this will be used as an excuse for discriminatory traffic management, “using the justification that congestion was just about to materialise.”