Europe’s internet neutrality guidelines that help an open web can be undermined if EU regulators drive tech giants Google, Meta and Netflix to shoulder among the prices of its telecoms community, digital rights activists warned on Wednesday.
The feedback from 34 NGOs from 17 nations, which embrace European Digital Rights, Civil Liberties Union for Europe, ARTICLE 19 and Electronic Frontier Foundation, got here in an open letter to European Commission digital chief Margrethe Vestager and EU trade chief Thierry Breton.
The teams stated they had been involved about feedback from Vestager final month during which she steered Big Tech companies may need to contribute to the price of telecoms infrastructure – one thing telecoms operators have lengthy lobbied for.
EU internet neutrality guidelines imply web service suppliers (ISPs) can’t block or throttle site visitors to offer precedence to some companies. Some specialists worry this dedication would possibly get watered down in a cope with Big Tech to assist fund telecoms networks.
“Charging content and application providers for the use of internet infrastructure would undermine and conflict with core net neutrality protections in the European Union,” the teams stated.
They in contrast such a transfer to the Trump administration’s try and eradicate internet neutrality protections within the United States.
The teams criticised EU telecom corporations for pushing a proposal first raised in 2012.
“The EU’s net neutrality law allows Europeans to use the bandwidth they buy from their ISPs however they want – whether for Netflix, YouTube, Facebook, or for a small, local site or service,” they stated.
“Thus European telecom companies are already compensated by their own internet service customers for transporting this data over their access networks; they simply want to be paid twice for the same service.”
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Source: www.financialexpress.com”