“Net Neutrality means so many things that it doesn’t mean anything at all,” said Robert Pepper, Cisco’s Vice-President for Global Advanced Technology Policy yesterday at the EU’s Summit on the Open Internet and Net Neutrality in Europe. Mr. Pepper’s statement sums up the summit accurately – the summit wasn’t about Net Neutrality per se, it was about growth, innovation, new business models, and the digital economy.
The purpose of the summit was to bring together industry leaders, policy makers, and interested parties in order to discuss the recent public consultation on Net Neutrality and the Open Internet which closed on September 30th. The initial findings of that consultation had been made public and the European Commission brought together people in order to discuss, explain, and back up the outcome of those findings.
This is good news for customers and Internet access providers alike. Presentations by AT&T, Cisco, Telefonica, Nokia Siemens, ECTA and OFCOM, to name a few, all supported the idea that industry knows best when facing Internet access and traffic issues. Cisco discussed network traffic and the development of the policy issues while Telefonica and Nokia Siemens provided the summit attendees with an in depth, technical explanation why traffic management does exist and is in fact crucial to the workings and development of the Internet. Policy advocates like ECTA, OFCOM, and GSMA supported the European Commission’s stance by discussing in detail issues around transparency and communications, industry best practice, the ability to switch service providers, infrastructure investment, and business innovation.
The summit was not without European Commission’s critics. Representatives from the BBC, Skype, and Quadrature du Net all put forth pro-net neutrality points of view by discussing neutrality as a founding principle of the Internet and access providers as unnecessary gatekeepers. Skype went so far as to complain on several occasions that their VOIP services were being blocked and this lead to a healthy discussion from access providers and technical infrastructure developers on when and why they would not block Skype, but manage the VOIP traffic in high use Internet times.
Overall, the debate was measured, reasoned, and teeming with facts. At the end of the day, it was clear to the audience why traffic management was necessary and essential to the Internet as we know it and why a light touch on regulation businesses and consumers provided the best possible outcome. This summit offered Europe with something that the US has failed to do – a well reasoned debate on Net Neutrality with the ultimate outcome being that transparency to customers, business innovation, private investment, and competition in the market is the best way forward.
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