After an epic vote fail in the lower house yesterday (labour accidentally voted against net neutrality lolfail), which was rectified today, The Netherlands has officially become the second country in the world, and the first in Europe, to turn net neutrality into law (okay, technically it needs to pass the senate, but that’s more of a formality in our system). A big middle finger to Sarkozy, Cameron, and Obama. Hey Chile, ./fistbump.sh. We’re honoured to follow in your footsteps!
More good news: you’re not at all forced to choose between moving to Chile or the Netherlands. These countries are just early in putting this into law and it’s very well possible that other nations will follow in the future, maybe even sooner now.
Hmmm. I think it’d have to be Chile because Spanish is going to be way easier to learn than Dutch, plus Chile has some nice beaches.
Can someone post a link to the actual text of the legislation? Google-fu is failing me.
Here is a first translation by hand:
https://www.bof.nl/2011/06/15/net-neutrality-in-the-netherlands-stat…
That is good news, but we could have done without the juvenile colour commentary. I like to think OSAlert is a place where comments declaring “first!”, “epic fail” and the like are avoided.
Well, OSAlert is run by ordinary people, and we sometimes like to mess around. The tech world takes itself FAR too seriously, and I love playing around with that.
There goes your shot at the Fortune 500.
Oh c’mon! These fine news warrant some juvenile expressions, don’t they!
To be fair it was a textbook fail of epic proportions. I think the reporting reflected that
Now we can just wait for the stories on the unintended consequences. Such as making filtering companies illegal. And no more free delivery of books on your Amazon Kindle.
Stories about that won’t make it to OS News, because that would destroy the narrative.
In other news the Dutch government has now moved on to regulate cookies. Within a few years they’ll have regulated every bit on the internet. What a great result.
Filtering companies are not illegal. This is bullshit. You are still free to install filtering software client-side – ISPs are not allowed to do it server-side, though.
What? You realise Amazon is not active in The Netherlands, right? And the Kindle isn’t sold here, right?
Exactly. So previously perfectly legitimate businesses, for which their were paying customers, have now been outlawed.
We’re now using force to shutdown businesses. What a great law. What a great win. The big boot of the government making companies illegal.
If you owned one of these companies, your job has just been declared illegal. But that’s the headline you didn’t want to write Thom.
Well, in that case it won’t be sold anytime soon.
Over the years, we have outlawed several business practices, products, and the like. Do you cry tears for how tobacco companies are being limited in their sales? Do you cry for Hummer that ever stricter environment protection laws participated in its demise? Do you care about the loss of business for companies making dangerous pesticides that have been outlawed? Do you care about the loss of sales coming from laws against the use of asbestos?
And so on? And so forth?
As I’ve said before – you need a dose of reality.
Yes, companies offering filtering services to customers are equal to those making dangerous pesticides. What a great comparison.
I’ve seen reality. Thom supporting the jackboot of government.
And I don’t like it.
Have a look at the analyses from Bits of Freedom:
https://www.bof.nl/2011/06/16/filtervoorstel-overbodig-maar-wel-risk… (sorry it is in Dutch, but I think “Berend de boer” can probably read it)
They say it is unnecessary.
Do you really have such a naive faith in capitalism, free enterprise and the corporate world as it seems?
I just saw a government outlawing businesses.
Dozens of people will come home from work today and tell their families they don’t have a job anymore.
Do you really have such a naive faith in governments as it seems?
The government outlaws a lot of stuff that you could potentially make money from. Sometimes that’s good, sometimes not so.
Don’t be so dramatic unless you can back it up.
No but neither do I have the almost endearing, misguided faith in the inherent good of the market that many people seem to have.
Berend de Boer,
“I just saw a government outlawing businesses. Dozens of people will come home from work today and tell their families they don’t have a job anymore.”
Well, if the companies’ business models are oppressive or discriminatory, then I have no problem telling them to either close up shop or find a business model which actually serves customers instead of controlling us.
I don’t want my ISP dictating what services I use. Whole swaths of the WWW could be relegated to premium subscriptions because those site owners don’t have contracts in place with the ISPs. This is pretty much what it will come to if we allow ISPs to discriminate traffic.
I pay for the bits I use, it shouldn’t matter where they come from or where they are going.
Unless ofcourse I’m trying to distribute spam/malware and so on.
And that is exactly what deap packet inspection was meant to be able to look for.
Interesting. It might actually be that malware inspection or virus checking is now illegal too. Wouldn’t surprise me.
No it isn’t.
Atleast the draft I read last included a technical-reason-exception.
As far as I understand it your ISP can still provide the service but it has to be under your control.
Meh, “deep packet inspection” is mostly snakeoil, especially for encrypted traffic. I’m sure there are companies who wants to sell you their awesome DPI products though.
These are companies providing filtering services for their customers (i.e. porn filters), so customers get so called “safe” internet.
That just became illegal.
Berend de Boer,
“These are companies providing filtering services for their customers (i.e. porn filters), so customers get so called ‘safe’ internet. That just became illegal.”
I doubt the validity of this statement. If you can cite the relevant piece of legislation then we can debate it.
In principal, I see no reason an ISP couldn’t offer add-on services to customers, but these services should be completely elective (as in explicit opt-in) and should not preclude customers from signing up to competing services.
If the ISP wants to offer these services in such a way that discriminates against competing services, then that should be illegal.
Nope.
People can buy filtering services if they want.
ISPs just can’t force them on their customers.
There’s a world of difference. Would you really like a world where someone could modify your brain so that you can’t see some people, forever, not even know that they exist ? Every blocking service should be separate from the core access to information.
Edited 2011-06-23 06:18 UTC
What the large ISPs did was charge extra for not filtering. That’s something different from companies that charge extra for instating filtering (to protect e.g. against porn). The latter hasn’t been outlawed, but the former, thankfully, has.
I’m curious to know though whether this law also requires ISPs to allow access to news groups, as most ISPs (in the NL) charge extra for access to them.
Really? Ziggo doesn’t for me. Then again, I have had the same top-tier internet access since before Ziggo was even formed (back when it was called Multikabel), so it might simply be non-default now, but still included for free for people with older contracts (I’ve been on this contract for… Six years or so).
According to this info: https://www.ziggo.nl/#producten/internet/extra-diensten/nieuwsservic… it depends on the type of contract you have. They seem to choke bandwidth and instill a quotum per month.
jai_,
“What the large ISPs did was charge extra for not filtering. That’s something different from companies that charge extra for instating filtering (to protect e.g. against porn). The latter hasn’t been outlawed, but the former, thankfully, has.”
I’m not sure why anyone would ever argue differently – for filtering against the consumer’s wishes. It just doesn’t make sense.
“I’m curious to know though whether this law also requires ISPs to allow access to news groups, as most ISPs (in the NL) charge extra for access to them.”
Is the port blocked entirely or do they just charge for access to their own servers?
More and more US ISPs are implementing port blocking. Most block SMTP outbound. Some block a number of ports inbound (80 comes to mind).
When I was at university, Roadrunner blocked identd and 6000-7000 inbound (yes the whole range). I believe this was intended to block IRC servers, but this infuriated me at the time because it blocked the X-session protocol. I also remember some games needed someone at another ISP to host them, our end was being blocked by RR.
Today Optimum Online blocks a number of ports, those affecting me include 25, 80, 21. They also break the DNS protocol to serve ads instead of nxdomain.
Armstrong currently blocks all incoming ports below 1024, which annoys me to no end since it breaks ssh/sftp/rsync.
I forget which ISP it was now, but I had discovered one which was intercepting all DNS requests on port 53 and ignoring the destination IP in order to serve ads.
The internet is already becoming fragmented just at the port level, explicit permission to control content at a fine grained level would be a disaster.
You need to edit your _wall of text_ it is unreadable
Fergy,
“You need to edit your _wall of text_ it is unreadable”
Is it the length you object do or is there something you don’t understand? It simply examples of how blocked ports and protocols are fragmenting the internet.
Use the quote blocks for quotes. Don’t use 10 paragraphs. Have a clear theme per paragraph. Your first paragraph should be the quotes plus your answers. The second your examples of filtering. The third your conclusion.
Fergy,
“Use the quote blocks for quotes. Don’t use 10 paragraphs. Have a clear theme per paragraph. Your first paragraph should be the quotes plus your answers. The second your examples of filtering. The third your conclusion.”
Ah, a meta discussion. Haha, I thought you might have been talking about the contents.
Edited 2011-06-25 18:23 UTC
Optimum recently took over Bresnan, and anyone with Bresnan was grandfathered into Bresnan’s old TOS and pricing hierarchy. Before I migrated my account over Optimum “Boost” 30 mbps from Bresnan “Speed Plus” 18 mbps I asked them specifically if that was going to happen. They told me it does not, and sure enough I can still run apache and sshd from my home computer. Their TOS says that, but that’s so that people do not run commercial services off a home connection. They do not enforce it, but it gives them a legal standing to boot someone that’s using a residential connection to run a commercial service.
I also have not run into issues with their DNS, but that’s because I use Google’s DNS server as it’s faster.
steampoweredlawn,
“They told me it does not, and sure enough I can still run apache and sshd from my home computer. Their TOS says that, but that’s so that people do not run commercial services off a home connection. They do not enforce it…”
I actually tested it after you said this, and I still find my ports blocked.
This link seems to have the explanation – by paying for the premium boost package, they’ll unblock the ports.
http://www.dslreports.com/faq/5684
Ah that explains it, I have their “Boost” upgrade.