from Hacker News

European Parliament votes against net neutrality amendments

by majc2 on 10/27/15, 12:59 PM with 38 comments

  • by protomyth on 10/27/15, 2:14 PM

    "It is thought that many MEPs would have been reluctant to begin a process of amending the regulation given that it might have delayed another aspect of the rules - the abolishment of mobile data roaming charges."

    That probably should have been the first paragraph of every article (8th in this one) about these amendments. I can see why a politician would value abolishment of mobile data roaming charges more.

  • by rudids on 10/27/15, 3:09 PM

    The problem here is that this was badly put together legislation. I don't think the idea of net neutrality was actually debated at all in reality. The need to abolish mobile data roaming charges in the EU was front and centre of the needs of these MEP's constituents minds and they would not vote this down, it would've been mad for them politically. Whoever wrote this piece of legislation is to blame here.

    I would be very surprised if this didn't come back for debate in another form prior to it's adoption.

  • by zoner on 10/27/15, 4:36 PM

    We are experiencing speed problems to many servers. Our broadband is BT Fibre. While accessing some sites is very fast, sometimes others are slow.

    For example downloading from Bitbucket from the UK is peaking on 600kB/s, then after a minute, it's dropping to 60kB/s, then stays there for the following 15 minutes.

    The same content downloaded from one of our servers in a UK data centre stays on 600kB/s.

    I think this is a clear evidence that the service provider is cutting the bandwidth after a minute, which is not what we paid for.

  • by gerty on 10/27/15, 3:50 PM

    If you're not sure if you should be pissed at your MEP, here are the votes (PDF): http://bit.ly/1NydR8L

    It's from page 19, Pilar Del Castillo Vera section.

  • by siscia on 10/27/15, 3:13 PM

    At first I was very sad when I read the article.

    However I hope that we, as European, could take this as a challenge and come out with a way to completely obfuscate the web traffic, wich I believe will be extremely important in the coming year.

    We should see this as an opportunity, maybe we won't come out with the next Netflix, but hopefully we will be able to to set the standard for privacy and security online, so needed right now...

  • by shmerl on 10/27/15, 7:09 PM

    So how do they explain refusal to correct obvious anti neutrality parts of this "neutrality" legislation? By too much money from ISPs in their pockets?

  • by greathi on 10/27/15, 2:55 PM

    There's lots of competition in Europe, so net neutrality doesn't matter. It's just extra government regulation in an area that doesn't need it. Think of it as a symptom rather than a problem.