Une bonne comparaison des différences entre la réglementation US et celle qui sera mise au vote au Parlement UE dans quelques heures concernant la neutralité des réseaux. À lire.


« The European Parliament is scheduled to vote on net neutrality rules on Tuesday, and at first glance the proposed regulations appear very similar to ones already in place in the United States. [...] Let’s examine the four major parts of the EU proposal that net neutrality advocates are trying to change and compare these to the US rules.

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But there’s an exception for “specialized services,” defined by the EU as “electronic communication services other than Internet access services, for which specific levels of quality, that are not assured by Internet access services, are necessary.” Examples given in the EU’s description of its rules include IPTV, high-definition videoconferencing, and health care services such as telesurgery.

In the US, the Federal Communications Commission’s net neutrality rules say that specialized services—including facilities-based VoIP offerings, heart monitors, or energy consumption sensors—may also be offered without violating the ban on paid prioritization. While these are Internet Protocol services, they’re treated separately from general Internet access.

The FCC also said that because specialized services are not the same as general broadband Internet access, they cannot be offered over the same Internet access service. To a consumer, these IP-based services may look the same as Internet access in general, but they would use capacity reserved for them only.

The EU proposal doesn’t require separate capacity for specialized services and general Internet access. Instead, EU ISPs would be required to provide enough capacity so that specialized services can be offered without slowing down general Internet access.

Requiring separate capacity for specialized services is preferable to having them use the same capacity as general Internet access, van Schewick said. In her article, she said that a specialized services provision “allows applications to emerge that would not be able to function on the open Internet because they need special treatment that the open Internet cannot provide.”

But she worries that the EU definition is too broad, allowing ISPs to claim just about anything is a specialized service. Big-pocketed online services companies would then be able to easily buy greater access to consumers than startups, she said

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Just like the FCC’s net neutrality rules, the EU proposal doesn’t ban zero-rating or “sponsored data,” in which certain content doesn’t count against a user’s data cap. An ISP or mobile carrier could favor its own content by zero-rating it or accept payments from other companies that want zero-rated data.

Van Schewick says the FCC approach is superior because it sets out a process in which consumers or companies can bring complaints against ISPs. (At the same time that it enacted net neutrality rules, the FCC reclassified broadband providers as common carriers, allowing many more types of complaints.)

The EU rule could preempt existing rules in specific countries, such as a ban on zero-rating in the Netherlands. Van Schewick and other net neutrality advocates are calling on the EU to include language allowing individual European nations to adopt additional regulations restricting or banning zero-rating.

As currently proposed, net neutrality rules would let an EU ISP exempt its own online video service from data caps while counting competing video services against its customers’ data limits, van Schewick said. An ISP could also demand payment from companies that want their services to be exempt from data caps.

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While the EU proposal instructs Internet providers to “treat all traffic equally,” it also lets providers implement “reasonable traffic management measures” based upon the “different technical quality of service requirements of specific categories of traffic.”

In short, ISPs would be allowed to treat one type of application (say, online gaming) different from another (such as file sharing or voice). The proposal says that ISPs must make these decisions transparently, in non-discriminatory fashion, using sound technical analysis—not based on any commercial considerations.

The FCC’s rules against blocking and throttling also have an exception for “reasonable network management.” But van Schewick points out that the FCC’s non-discrimination rule specifically says that ISPs must not discriminate against classes of applications.

“The no-blocking rule prohibits network practices that block a specific application or service, or any particular class of applications or services, unless it is found to be reasonable network management,” the FCC rules say.

The FCC defines reasonable network management vaguely as practices that are “primarily used for and tailored to achieving a legitimate network management purpose.” To be “reasonable,” a practice has to be justified with technical concerns and not business ones.
ISPs might also put encrypted traffic into a “slow lane” because they can’t identify what type of application it is, she said.

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Lastly, the EU’s proposal lets ISPs take into account “impending network congestion.” That means ISPs could impose network management practices if congestion is “about to materialize” rather than when it actually occurs.

In the US, the FCC did not allow “impending congestion” to count under the reasonable network management exception to its no-blocking and no-throttling rules.

That means US ISPs would only be able to implement network management during periods of actual congestion, van Schewick says. »