 On the internet, you decide what you do, right? This is a question that I found on your website, respectmynet.eu. And well, I don't know what you think. It sounds quite plausible, but the answer that they give is maybe not. So who that is who actually decides what you do on the internet and what consequences that has and what you can do against that. These two men will tell you now, they are Thomas Lohninger who fought against data retention in Austria and successfully and he has been very active in net politics ever since. He is here with Christopher Talipe, campaign manager for La Quadratie du Net, the French NGO Fighting for Civil Rights. Welcome. Together they say, make the internet neutral again. Please give them a warm applause. Thanks, everyone. Is the microphone working? Yeah, great. So first I have to say something for that title, if the slides could come up. Okay, we don't have slides so far. So make the internet neutral again. When we decided to have this title for our talk, this was of course before Donald Trump became elected and most of our talk will be about how to enforce net neutrality, how to really keep the internet free and open, but of course we also have to have to talk about what will happen in the US. We both worked on the safetyinternet.eu campaign. This common effort of various NGOs around Europe started three years ago when the commission proposed a very disastrous law on net neutrality that would basically abandon the principle and we followed this law throughout the legislative process on all stages and then even through the regulatory implementation and you can all see on safetyinternet.eu there is now an archive page because let's talk a little bit more about this campaign. What is unique here is that we really open sourced every line of code that we wrote for this campaign, including the tools that we used for contacting your representatives, the members of the European Parliament, as well as the regulatory agencies. And here you see the traffic graph because we also have visitor statistics from PVIC throughout these three years and there you can see that we had huge success from various players around Europe. From the Netherlands, from a huge shout out to the Reddit community, they were awesome and also change.org, NetsPolitik.org and Alexander Lehman helped us a lot as well as Firefox, which ran a snippet for safetyinternet in the last parts of the campaign. And in the final stages of this fight for net neutrality in Europe, we really brought the protest to the streets. There were demonstrations in Barcelona, Riga, Bonn, Brussels and Vienna. And this was really a group effort. At the end, this coalition grew more and more and we had 23 NGOs from 14 countries that joined us in this. And ultimately, we achieved almost half a million submissions to Barrack, the body of European regulators for electronic communications. And this is really an historic number because all previous consultations of the regulators in Europe had a maximum of around 100 comments. So in order process, they had so much public interest and engagement and this really changed the landscape within the regulators because suddenly they were observed by the public and before that, they were basically hiding behind some processes and not really having to engage with their own constituency. If we look at the submissions by country, you can see that Germany has the largest share. This is of course because the debate here in Germany is a little bit more nuanced and widespread than in other countries. But still, we also had the UK and France and Spain and Italy that contributed a lot through this campaign. But also, being an Austrian, I want to point out that if you use small countries, disproportionately contributed with submissions. Austria, Sweden, Denmark and Belgium really kicked ass and that's probably because they had very good NGOs that although most of them only run with volunteers could really mobilize in their local language to get the word out and get people engaged for net neutrality. So we now have this law and we also have the regulatory implementation. So what does it actually say? What type of net neutrality do we have now in Europe for half a billion people? It is no longer possible to just block or censor content based on commercial reasons. So you can no longer prohibit users, the user of voice or VIP or messaging or file sharing in the terms of services. They can still be blocking for legal reasons if you have a law, if you have a court order, but an ISP cannot arbitrarily start blocking parts of the internet. This is clearly prohibited. We have a new right. We have a device freedom now. That means that you can connect any type of device to your internet connection and your ISP can no longer charge you, for example, for using your phone's internet on your laptop, tethering. That's really clear and absolutely clear. Also on specialized services, I'm particularly happy that we reached this result because this was maybe 60% of the whole debate in the European Parliament and throughout the legislative process, what should we do with specialized services? And originally, they were intended to be the loophole for net neutrality, to circumvent the whole net neutrality by just making some service and specialized service. But now we really limited this danger to something that is handleable and now a specialized service can only be something which could technically not work over the open internet. And you can see this clearly. I mean, that's a picture from the video that Facebook shows you when you have your birthday. And I found this so telling because this power plot with a Facebook sign is exactly what a specialized service in the bad reading would be. It is no longer a universal connection that allows you to use every device with this network. Instead, it's just for one service. And if we go down that road, we lose the universal character of the internet which allows us to do everything with it. Every invention, every idea, unequal footing. With this model, it is one Facebook plug, one Google plug and so forth. Another important issue that's still ongoing and not as clear as the previous ones is zero rating. A zero rating is the practice of exempting certain services from your data cap. So you have your two gigabytes, but WhatsApp does not count towards those two gigabytes. The new rules say this has to be handled on a case-by-case basis. So it's quite dubious to see how this will play out. We have a few rulings now from Austria, Sweden and one from Hungary. But this is really an ongoing process. What is clear is that you cannot technically discriminate stuff with zero rating. So you cannot say after you used up your data cap and the rest of the internet is blocked, you can still use the zero rated application. This is clearly prohibited, but about the zero rating itself, it's an ongoing process. Traffic management, the last issue, is the day-by-day operations of a network. So what do you do when you have a congestion, when there is too much traffic and the pipe is not big enough? How do you handle this? And we have a principle that says traffic management has to be application agnostic, so everything has to be treated the same. But you can have exceptions for class-based traffic management based on quality of service characteristics. But the burden of proof here lies with the ISPs. If the ISP wants to manage that traffic, they have to really have a justification why this is necessary and in line with the new law. And we will closely monitor how ISPs make this transparent and how NRAs will handle this. We are not really happy with the result on this one, but it's still a workable text. And now I'm gonna hand it over to my colleague. Thank you, Thomas. You hear me well? Okay. Basically, Respect My Net is a grassroots tool we use for campaigning for net neutrality. It was built to try to see what kind of infraction and violation you could see on net neutrality. It's an old tool, it has already a few years. We rebooted it for the last campaign for the barracks that Thomas told you about. And basically what we will use it now is to try to see how ISPs and operators are going to implement net neutrality regulation in Europe. So you know what we have, it's a law. We have, as Thomas could say, different concepts. That allows good things and also bad things. However, the question is to know how those things are going to be implemented. So what it is now, it's like crowdsourced research for net neutrality violation. Basically, this tool allows you to input and to see if there are net neutrality violation or in your country or in your operator, sorry. It could have crowdsourced documents of all types of net neutrality violation in Europe. And also it could be, we have a MeToo button that allows you to say if you've experienced this as well. And so you don't feel alone in front of your internet connection having problems and wondering if this is your connection or if this is a contract-based or general complication from the operator. You could see that if other people already have it. But crowdsourcing, most of the net neutrality violation is not enough. What we'll do with all those violations? We'll just say, ah, they're doing that stuff. Well, as you say in French, that makes a good legged. But yeah, that's a joke that cannot be translated really. Basically, we will be using that to fix those violations and to allow people to actually see that pin-pointing and to notice all type of violation could allow us to fix them when the BEREC will review the regulation on net neutrality and he will do that periodically. We can go and arrive with a huge document saying there are problems here, here, here and there. So I'm already skipping in front of my next slide and it's a huge documentation and in our activist world of Internet, when everything is very, very quick and we are very quick on new information, it's hugely important to have good documentation and to remember what happened before and so it doesn't happen again, especially on net neutrality as this campaign hasn't been ongoing for several years now. The second thing that's interesting for that type of tool is to allow telecom regulators to be accountable. So for example, French National Regulation Agency really likes this tool because they can see what private companies are doing more or less behind them back. To give an example, Belgian telecom operators, for example, Belga Comaproximus waited for the publication of the net neutrality regulation and when they saw that zero rating were more or less accepted but only will be blocked on a case-by-case decision, they published and they issued a lot of new contracts and subscription with zero rating. So for example, you have that one also in Germany if I recall well that you can use your data caps on your mobile device until a certain amount but when you reach that amount everything is down speed except WhatsApp and that's in the net neutrality violation and that's a really good example of what zero rating is and that actually should be illegal and that's what we have respect my net. It's fairly easy to use and it's a very lost cost of time because when you see what you have issues on your computer you can check it out if you have a violation usually you can see that already in your contract and that's why we create a fairly easy form. As you could understand this is a very complicated issue and that involves a lot of different elements especially when there are elements from low there are elements from telecom regulation but we try to make it as simple as possible and so you can see the different points on country type of operator, the contract you have is it a fix or mobile line you have and also the type of discrimination you can see here you have just zero rating because that will be the biggest type of discrimination we will experience in the next years however you still have trade throttling class base, contract base and so on and so on. When you input that kind of discrimination and respect my net.eu you are behind the scene on the backstage we have a team that will review cases and to see if there are enough information to use that as a good case. For example if you just tell us my internet is low that is not enough, that's why we try to make enough question, enough place for you to describe to give as much information as you could and you can to develop that and that after it's shown on the web page and after that we gathered all that information which is no personal identification information that adjusts identification on the type of cases. Respect my net.eu is a tool that has been on ongoing development because we are trying to use it for something that it has not been programmed for and now we are using it to be fixed for example to have a fixed type of sign flag let's say on a certain violation we are going to develop linguistic admin groups because for example I don't speak German and when you have input from a German speaking it's difficult to understand what it is especially when it's linked to the contract and we're trying to develop visualization of cases so if you have graphic designer or data visualization or aficionado you're welcome to help us. Basically Respect my net has everything most of us do, it's free like in free speech and like in free beer it's easy to use, it's cross source database so if you like database come play with us and really get involved with that because there is a tremendous amount of work on a subject that does not involve terrorism which lately is very scarce we have everything of the information on our GitLab you have the address here git.lacquadrature.net you'll have anyway that's on the front page and you have information on our wiki wiki.lacquadrature.net Now let's we'll speak now on the future thing and I'll let the scene to Thomas. Thank you Chris. How can we use this tool? How can we use Respect my net? Because we now enter a stage on net neutrality as well as with the new general data protection regulation in Europe where we have quite good laws but now we have to deliver them to the people because it's not of much value if you have privacy and principle but your data actually is in the hands of someone else and the same with net neutrality it doesn't matter if you are not allowed to block services when in fact your internet is restricted by your ISP and what we will do particularly as Epicent works as our organization we have this as a high priority to really work on delivering net neutrality to the people there is this concept of strategic litigation which is well in place in the US the American Civil Liberties Union as well as the Electronic Frontier Foundation picked their cases to really litigate full fundamental rights in a strategic way and we want to apply these concepts now to net neutrality and we've already done that in one case we looked at the violation of an Austrian mobile operator 3 Hutchinson and they did exactly this type of zero rating that I explained earlier is clearly prohibited where you have this one graph which is the violet one which is the public broadcaster in Austria and when you reach the data cap at 2130 seconds it goes down to a flatline but free mobile TV service their in-house television service continues to run without interference so that's a classical technical discrimination between applications which is clearly prohibited we submitted a case, it was successful they cancelled this type of violation for all new contracts and they changed the landscape of all their contracts because they could no longer give their own services a competitive advantage they quadrupled up to 17 times the amount of volume that you can buy with this operator and this is not a singular phenomenon we have similar cases in the Netherlands as well as with Slovenia once an ISP is no longer allowed to give preferential treatment to their own service they start giving more volume to all their subscribers which is of course a really good thing but as I said, zero rating is one of the biggest problems that we have and if you want to put it in numbers around 40% of all internet providers in Europe currently zero rate at least one application so this is really an endemic problem that you can find in almost every network and country and so we really have to do something about it because there are drastic scenarios that are in front of us Mark Zuckerberg announced two times already that he wants to bring his walled garden called Free Basic, previously internet.org also to Europe he recently also announced that he wants to bring Free Basic to the US and in the US we have quite a hard time ahead Donald Trump is not really a fan of net neutrality from the few comments that we could analyse so far and if you look at the three people that he appointed to his transition team for the regulator, the FCC in the US there is a quite horrible outlook Jeffrey Eisenach as well as Mark Jameson and Roslyn Layton are hardcore telecom lobbyists and you can really get a picture of what's coming in the US if you look at the paper Beyond Net Neutrality from Mark Jameson and Roslyn Layton from June of this year what they propose here is to basically replace all net neutrality rules with a multi-stakeholder concept but they have a very unique interpretation of what multi-stakeholder means they only limit this multi-stakeholder group to the 20 biggest industry players they explicitly say no civil society, no consumer protection, no scientists so it's basically the industry making their own rules they also propose new barriers for every type of ex-ante regulation of the FCC so that's basically putting net neutrality in a bin in the US which would also risk the competitive advantage that the US has right now as the powerhouse of all startup innovation if this really comes through then only the startups that partner up with existing monopolies have a chance to compete in Europe we also have a quite worrying proposal part of the legacy of Günther Ettinger he proposed in September of this year a new regulation for Barrack who here knows what Barrack is? Hands up oh, actually quite a few, it's good Barrack is the umbrella above the European regulators for the internet and it's an agency that has done quite a good job on various occasions they are a voice of reason they have quite a good model to really incorporate different views and what the commission is proposing with this new law is basically replacing this agency making it into an independent legal personality and having a complete control on all levels from the commission so in this law you can find the commission writing itself into this independent agency on many many occasions and the most obscure outcome of this is the executive director as well as the quite powerful Board of Appeals they will be chosen by regulators but only from a list pre-compiled by the European Commission and that's quite a communistic tradition of democracy and we have to follow this closely it is now entering the legislative process in the EU and if this would go through as it was proposed this would basically mean that the agencies in task of enforcing that neutrality are under a complete power grab of the European Commission which has proven times and times again that it is mostly interested in industry policy but not really in the citizen's interest for all of that we need you to put the violations that you come across in your daily internet experience into respectmynet.eu as well as write to team at epicenter.org because we are also very interested in learning about the violations that are out there and about really finding partners in various countries with whom we can submit cases to the regulators in that country and really keep the internet free and open you can put it like that with this new net neutrality law we now have a toolbox to really keep the internet open and with respectmynet we have a crowdsource to-do list of all the violations that we have to get rid of thanks for your attention and as a last word we were previously this organization now we are this organization we changed our name thanks I think we have time for a few more questions so please step up to the microphones if you have one and I'll call your number nobody so far is there a question from the internet? also not so you answered all open questions exhaustively that is great there is a question there is a question oh up there well then number five please go ahead hi Marin here my question as an IT guy is do you think about automation the process to file this complaints? so I'm thinking about people run out there quota per month and they can easily start an app which checks about 50 different services see which services perform good and which not and automatically do a complaint on your site something like that if I understand well your question that if we are planning to automate the system of inputting subscription input in respectmynet yeah the thing is that that would only cover a certain type of violation it won't for example don't think in what I understood it won't be able to cover for example contract based violations but that could be an idea why not I mean if you go to respectmynet.eu you will find a list of the measurement tools that are out there right now the software that you can use on your own computer to test if your internet connection is open and neutral but most of the software is hardware sadly it has not been updated in quite a few years and then we need more developers to actively engage in those software tools and I hope now that more people will do that because the threat in the US is quite real and we need better software automated testing happens as part of some between clients for example which upload their data to measurement lab and there are some programs like that but not really on a wide scale okay so the next one is the person on microphone number three please yes I have a question regarding the regulation to reform BEREC are you planning to fight this regulation and if so and if not are there any ways to fight it for the rest of us to be eager yes we are now this is just the beginning of this dossier so it has been proposed on September 14th of 2016 and now the parliament and councillor just slowly starting to work on that and it's part of a much bigger package of legislation called the telecom call and we are in ongoing conversations with legislators and the various political parties to see what is the best strategy and if we think that there is a reason to really have a companion we will have one but right now it is too early to say thanks okay thank you very much and the next person on microphone number three please thank you very much for an excellent talk for save the internet there was a lot of national NGOs active and with this proposed power grab of Barrick how can we at a national level help support the telecom tele regulators nationally to save the net neutrality the best thing to do right now would be to speak with your telecom ministry infrastructure minister you have is responsible of this in the European council because they are the ones that are now forming their opinion and I know from quite a few countries where this is really an open situation so they are welcoming input from citizens and then of course speak with the members of European parliament from your country they are the ones ultimately voting on this I'm not aware if we already have a rapporteur on that but there will be one soon and telecom package the worst the worst rapporteur that we could possibly have had for the net neutrality but speak with your local ministry and your members of the European parliament that's the right answer for that and I hope that also a few countries and as well as regulators will see this power grab as what it is because the commission is not really in the position to insert itself on all levels of government which is just the wrong approach okay so it's time for one last question please a short one, number four thank you very much for the talk I was wondering do you think it's possible to actually convince telecom companies to be on our side so to say and to get rid of all those zero rating things and convince them that net neutrality can be a good argument for customers or do you think the only way is through litigations or do you think there are the problem with telecom operators is that you go against their business model zero rating can increase their sales their clean their percentage and so on and the net neutrality cannot or at least not in the way they see it so there is two things, on one hand you have customer protection, on the other hand you have private profits so I think we'll be very comfortable with the type of arguments or advocacy that could link both and saying that we are making a better world but also we are contributing to capitalism so that's a tricky one but you know we can discuss it but it's doable, I mean there are a few USBs that are for net neutrality advocates because they've realized that net neutrality is good for their business model because this open platform creates the demand for the only product they really have which is internet access but it is really a question of their understanding of their own business model and for the most part they would either cannibalize the revenues of other companies that run on their network instead of just being a mere pipe but please try to convince them we do as well if you want to discuss more we'll be around the tea house of La Cordoature upstairs so you're welcome there thank you very much Christopher Antoinette