I’ve been keeping you up to date about the situation around net neutrality in The Netherlands – and today, everything finally came to its logical conclusion. During a debate in our lower house, most of the kinks were ironed out, and our minister of economic affairs, Maxime Verhagen, will now turn net neutrality into law. This means that after Chile, The Netherlands will be the second country in the world to do so.
I already told you that Verhagen wished to comply with the lower house’s demands, but I failed to make the clarification that he just wanted to prohibit carriers and ISPs from throttling and blocking, without actually turning it into a law. During today’s debate, he faced an almost unanimous lower house asking for net neutrality to actually become a full-grown, big-boy law.
The only party against net neutrality was the VVD, by word of Afke Schaart. As detailed in our previous coverage, it was easily revealed that up until she was instated as a member of the lower house last July, she was actually a lobbyist for KPN, the largest carrier in The Netherlands, and the first to announce plans to start charging extra for applications that competed with calling and texting (VoIP and things like WhatsApp), including blocking and throttling of these services.
The fact Schaart worked for KPN for nearly a decade before introducing her own, competing proposal which did not include net neutrality, of course called her loyalty and trustworthiness into question. Not entirely unsurprisingly, she retracted her own motion during the debate today, after facing a very hostile lower house.
A few concerns of Verhagen were addressed during the debate. The right-wing Christian-extremists of the SGP were concerned that due to net neutrality becoming a law, the business of ISP-side content filtering of things like violence and porn would become impossible. Other parties in the lower house advocated that filtering of these types of content is a client-side issue (i.e., you should take care of that yourself), but Verhagen, being from a Christian party himself, felt sympathetic to this concern. As such, as long as customers specifically choose to have such content filtered on idealogical grounds, ISPs are free to do so.
Another important aspect of our new telecommunications act is that the use of deep packet inspection will be restricted. While ISPs and carriers will be prohibited from using DPI to spy on their customers, they may still use it to manage their networks. The use of DPI will be inspected by our telecommunications watchdog OPTA.
The official vote on our new telecommunications act will take place next Tuesday, but considering the near-unanimous support for it, that’s nothing more than a formality. The Netherlands will become the second country in the world to add net neutrality to its laws; Chile did so last year. With this, we are ahead of the rest of Europe – and we’re sure going to be a thorn in the eye of France and the UK, which have both decided to disregard net neutrality to start censoring the web; worse yet, France is actively trying to enact world-wide censorship of the web.
It always seemed like a cool place to be, but the write up on how the process worked sounds like the politics in the Netherlands works as it should. Everyone, while adhering to their values and interests of their constituents work together to come up with a common sense bill that serves the common good.
Can I borrow your legislators for a year or two?
Pretty please?
Tom in America
It isn’t the legislators, it is the system where money for TV commercials and so on comes from donations.
In the Netherlands, if you find enough people to sign a petition like document you can start a political party. If you have a political party you get money for advertisements on TV. All parties get the same (or atleast simialir) amount of money/airtime for the TV commercial.
It is even clearly marked as “political party commercial”
I don’t know if these people have the right ideas, but atleast they understand that money for campaigns is the base problem:
http://www.fixcongressfirst.org/
True, our entire political system seems to have been sold to the highest bidder in the U$A. Even our agencies and the judicial system is corrupt. I think of Monsanto and how they essentially patented life, and now farmers must pay them protection money just to grow crops. Justice seems to have flown away a long time ago.
As for funding campaigns, our supreme court gave the thumbs up to companies pouring in unlimited funds to purchase various campaigns. This is the supreme court with Justice Clarence Thomas – former counsel for… Monsanto!
But we have baseball!
True, our entire political system seems to have been sold to the highest bidder in the U$A. Even our agencies and the judicial system is corrupt.
What makes you think the Dutch system is not corrupt? You should check out our “Public Services Desktop” fiasco. A slog which has been going on for nearly a decade.
In 2002 our lower house almost unanimously choose Open Source Software and Open Standards, which would approximately save us 1 billion Euro a year.
Now guess what: They will be purchasing Windows 7 and MS Office licenses.
… A very disappointed Dutch Free Software Advocate.
I atleast didn’t say the Dutch situation is perfect. There are many things I would like to see changed.
I was just stating that what they have in the US should be changed it depends to much on bribes, euh… campaign funding.
As for funding campaigns, our supreme court gave the thumbs up to companies pouring in unlimited funds to purchase various campaigns. This is the supreme court with Justice Clarence Thomas – former counsel for… Monsanto!
Uh, oh, Monsanto, isn’t that the famous company (monopolist) of genetically manipulated crop seeds, owned by the Bill and Melinda Gates “Charity”?
I heartily welcome this law as a Dutch citizen, but I also cannot help but wonder if this isn’t a solution that just remedies some symptoms of a deeper, underlying problem: a telecommunications market that is far from perfect.
In an ideal world we shouldn’t need a law that ensures net neutrality. Carriers just wouldn’t be able to get away with it, because it would mean customers would simply switch to another carrier. We, however, are in a situation with only 3 carriers remaining: KPN, Vodafone and T-Mobile. In an oligopolistic situation such as this one, suppliers tend to watch and copy each other carefully. And that is exactly what is happening here.
That is why I view this as a second best after proper market competition. But it sure as hell is better than an imperfect market without this law.
On the other hand, maybe we need both: strong competition AND this law.
Edited 2011-06-08 22:07 UTC
I think we should just start a project and really fix the problems with provider monopolies, mobile in the Netherlands is one thing, but look at this:
http://i.imgur.com/M3G7f.png (Canada)
There is already a lot of stupidity going on already:
http://thenextweb.com/mobile/2011/06/04/why-using-data-on-your-phon…
It really isn’t needed, they should just move to pushing bits. In that case they just setup an http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_exchange_point and than it becomes a lot less expensive.
Some of the technologies already exist to be able to do some things:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Femtocell
http://www.villagetelco.org/: MeshPotato, openwrt + B.A.T.M.A.N. + asterisk = wireless mesh telephony project already deployed with success in Africa on the meshpotato custom designed hardware.
In an ideal world, we shouldn’t need a law forbidding people not to steal either, but what can you do? It’s not corrupt businesses that is the problem; it is corrupt individuals.
This is just one big happy Internet day for me.
I wonder why the name of the country is written Netherlands and Holland. Why don’t they stick with just ONE way.
The Dutch word for “The Netherlands” is Nederland (not plural). Holland is a name for two provinces: North-Holland and South-Holland. In these 2 provinces most stuff is located. Business, industry, people, capital, government, etc…
So if you refer to The Netherlands as Holland the people not living in either of the mentioned provinces can become annoyed.
This was probably true in Ye Olde Days, but nowadays not so much afaik – I’ve lived in Brabant, Gelderland and Overijssel and never minded ‘Holland’ much, especially in the football/soccer season
.
Let me put it this way: as a Hollander with 50% Frisian blood, I don’t like being called a Limburger or Brabander, even though you guys are awesome (try going out and bump into someone in both Alkmaar and Eindhoven – in ALkmaar you’ll be lucky not to start a bar fight, while in Eindhoven the person you bump into will buy you a beer
.)
Steve would say: “Don’t bump in to people”
Actually the last tinme I nearly had some fighting (and ran away), was in Eindhoven….
Other funny thing: Nether en Hol in the names Netherlands en Holland, both refer to te fact that the country is for a big part below sealevel.
And another funny thing: De discussion was between 7!! members of the house of parlement. That’s is some nice democration….
That’s how it works 95% of the time. Only for big events (Prinsjesdag, the entire budget, first post-election debate, etc.) is the entire lower house present.
I’ve seen this before. I think parties have reprecentatives on for every issue that needs to be discussed in parliment.
The rest of the party mostly trusts/relies on them to get it right.
Maybe because it is hard to know everything about every subject.
Edited 2011-06-09 12:50 UTC
I recall some people didn’t like the show “Ik hou van Holland” because of the Nederland/Holland thing.
Personally I prefer “Nederland” as I don’t like the sound of “Holland” and because the latter is incorrect when referring to the entire country.
Also I guess “The Netherlands” is plural because it is derived from our official country name “Kingdom of The Netherlands” (Koninkrijk der Nederlanden). Which I guess includes those overseas islands and in the old days included Belgium and Luxembourg.
I’m still in favor of declaring war on those two countries and reclaim them.
No. I want them crawling back to us, tired, empty, desiring our help more than anything.
Much more fulfilling.
Belgium is about to, but I doubt Luxembourg would do this in my life time.
Belgium is weird. It’s like somebody took a map, lopped off a bit of France and a bit of the Netherlands, shoved them together and called it a country…
We Dutch DO stick to one name – Nederland, or The Netherlands in English. We NEVER refer to our own country as Holland, since that would be incorrect; it’d be like referring to the US as Dakota. Only foreigners use the term ‘Holland’, even though Holland doesn’t exist – there’s North and South Holland, two provinces. People from the rest of the country don’t appreciate being called ‘Holland’.
Our language actually isn’t called ‘Dutch’ either, another failure from the English language. Our language is actually called Netherlandic, but outside of linguistic circles, you won’t hear that term. ‘Dutch’ refers to the ancient language ‘Diets’, which is the common ancestor to both German and Netherlandic. Confusingly, in Netherlandic, ‘Duits’ (‘Dutch’) is the language of the Germans (we call Germany ‘Duitsland’).
Growing up, that has always been a great source of confusion, because as you say Germany is called Duitsland, so the term ‘Dutch’ never really made much sense to me. Now at least I know where it comes from.
I’m a bit embarrassed to say the thought never even occurred to me that the Dutch also found this English word perplexing.
Ehm, no Thom. When the Dutch play football we wear t-shirt with Holland written on it and we shout “Holland! Holland!”. We sing the song “Hup, Holland, Hup” etc so you are completely wrong here, we call The Netherlands Holland just like foreign people do.
Diets or Duyts actually is what we ourselves used to describe our own language in the middle ages when the nobility was speaking Latin and even in the 17th century when we were at our peak colony wise. It does not refer to some common language of which both Dutch and German have descended but simply means “of the people” or peoples’ language”. It is no surprise that the English refer to us as Dutch still.
I was speaking about official language and in day-to-day use. There are specific situation where we use Holland (in certain songs), but even during sports, we usually refer to “Nederland”, and far more commonly “Oranje”. I have NEVER heard e.g. a soccer commentator say “Holland tegen Duitsland” or something.
Our common ancestor language was called ‘Diets’, which indeed comes from ‘of the people’ – this term may have well been used in The Netherlands until way after the separation between Netherlandic and German, but that does not suddenly change the fact that the term Dutch comes from our common ancestor language.
Ok, totally off-topic but …
Yes, if you mean “the Dutch” with “our”, but you asserted that both Dutch and German originated from a language called Diets which is not true. Diets is not even an official language but a term used to describe a group of languages in The Netherlands and later (mis)used to describe the standard Dutch language before it was called Netherlandic and has never been used to denote a language from which the German language descended. Dutch and German are in different branches of the West Germanic language tree since well before even old Dutch.
Yes, Dutch comes from Diets and Duyts(ch) but as I mentioned Diets is not a common ancestor language or even a language at all but I digress.
I know it does not denote a specific language per se; I used it as a quick way to describe where the word ‘Dutch’ comes from. I wasn’t planning on elaborating the entire complicated history of the West-Germanic languages and dialects in an OSAlert comment ^^.
I love Indo-European language talk!! My favorite all-time book: In Search of the Indo-Europeans. AWESOME book – written for lay people such as myself who did not study archeology and linquistics.
So I should call it a Netherlandic Oven?
“While ISPs and carriers will be prohibited from using DPI to spy on their customers, they may still use it to manage their networks.”
well that isn’t very well net neutrality, is it?
“the net is neutral except for all the shit we want to filter out.”
OOPS
Deep Packet INSPECTION
How is inspection related to actively filtering?
…so now I should choose between Netherlands or Chile….suggestions?
oh I live in the mytical country dominated by the infamous media mogul Silvio Berlusconi!
I think I will migrate to Netherlands
OK, I get it. The right is Netherlands. Isn’t Netherlands the same as “Low Lands?” What is the reason for the use of the word Nether instead of more obvious and common ones to refer as “low”?
I’m sorry about this, it is because I see too many “Made in Holland” in so many CDs and LPs. Someone is getting wrong then…
Language changes.
That’s why we have a music-festival called Lowlands…