 Thank you all for coming. It's great to see you all again for this session. I remember we ran a session like this in Parliament just over a year ago. It was a very different time. The Commission presented its legislative proposal. On the other side of the pond, the SEC ruling hadn't come. Now we're looking at a very different picture and I really look forward to this. I'd like to thank also Martin Schaecker for hosting this session. Despite the security requirements in Parliament, it's a bit unfortunate that we have to restrict participation. We really try to have these sessions as often as possible. We have the possibility of interacting online through Twitter. The hashtag is NNUUS six letters. We're filming also this session and we'll be putting out a link to that. I remember using also a white paper in the conclusion of this session. A few words about Open from Academy. If you don't know us, Open from Academy is a think tank program that is dedicated to exploring the openness paradigm shift in the IT industry in all shapes and forms. We have a network of over 40 fellows, which are all experts in different respective areas. Actually, we have one today. Estimus is going to be drawing up the white paper. We run sessions like this in Parliament and outside Parliament every couple of months or so. We try to hash out some of the challenges to the policy discussion in the university. We're firstly independent. We're strictly not for profit, but as we often say we're also not for loss. We have to look for a sponsorship on an individual basis for these events. I'd like to thank Google for helping me make this one possible. A few words about how we run a session today. I'm going to hand over in just a couple of minutes to share a few words. Then we will let Jennifer Baker introduce the speaker and model the session. As I said, we have a Twitter hashtag. You're welcome to tweet. The presentation of the speakers is going to be filmed. It's going to be public. We'd like to have our Q&A session under the Japanese Household. We think that it encourages a more open discussion. Feel free to call people, but please don't let them out. I think that's about it. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to welcome you here at this very hour for a very important discussion on that. I think the timing could not have been better. We are really witnessing the build-up to a very important decision, mainly what the Council of Ministers is going to do with regard to their stance on the telecoms package. To have the opportunity to discuss with such distinguished experts, taking different perspectives and expertise on this topic is really great. As a member of Parliament, I've been working on this issue since 2009, when I was first elected. A little bit of background, perhaps to shed light on why. I think this is such an important topic for the open Internet and for the future of Europe and the digital economy. I'm from the Netherlands. The discussion on that neutrality was sparked there when during a shareholder meeting of our major telecoms operator, previously state-owned telecoms operator KVN, one of the board members explained to some of the shareholders asking about competition from voice-over IP services what the solution could be. Throttling, blocking and all kinds of other ways out. This is quite a major discussion based on two main elements. One, looking into data packages. How would the telecoms operator know what you as a consumer are doing, which sites you're visiting and which you are not? The other discussion that takes a Dutch person, I suppose, was more about why free services were not made available by telecoms operators. And although the discussion was sparked by KVN, it was soon clear that this was a common practice by all telecoms operators and after my party D66 initiated to have this enshrined by law, the Netherlands adopted the neutrality by law in a majority empowerment, not controversial as the first EU country, not European country, I should say, in the presence of our Norwegian friends. And I think it is really oftentimes misunderstood and that neutrality has been misrepresented here in the EU on a number of occasions. Some people, we see this also in the United States, notably on the Republican side, present that neutrality is over-regulating the open internet. Even though I think as a liberal and as anyone who believes in free markets and fair competition, rules are necessary to have fair competition and that neutrality is such a rule that is necessary. And practice has shown this because up until today and the initial thinking of the previous European Commission was that transparency on the terms of use and competition between telecoms and internet operators would ensure this fair competition, that rules were not needed. But practice shows, practice revealed by a major research by the European Consumer Rights Organization that up until today millions of Europeans do not have access to all sites on the worldwide web because blocking and twirling still happen today. So I think we have to keep the consumer and the internet user central in our minds when we talk about that neutrality. We should also think about future proof of legislation. If we do not have clear rules on that neutrality, what does it mean for the opportunities of the innovative startups that we cherish in Europe that we would like to see thriving and that now may not have the opportunity to get capital to have a fair chance to compete with the major players in the market. So for the sake of consumer rights, for the sake of innovation, startups and job creation and for the sake of fair competition, I think net neutrality is very important. Now, I was very excited when the telecom's single market package was announced and the net neutrality was one of the pinners. But we needed to do quite a bit of work here in the European Parliament to sharpen the definitions to make it much more clear what is net neutrality and also what our specialized services in order to have clear rules of the road in going forward. And the European Parliament supported these more clear definitions in a majority and we are now actually faced with another fight. Unfortunately, the proposals that we see coming out of the council, both when it comes to net neutrality and when it comes to ending roaming charges, are disappointing to an extent that they are nearly insulting. If we promise consumers, internet users to end roaming charges and we strive to do so by the end of this year, 2015, then the suggestion to give 5MB for free every day is an infinite distance away from that ambition. 5MB is 30 seconds of high quality news, a minute and a half in low quality. The Bohemian drug city wants, or sending 4 high quality pictures by email. So that is hardly the kind of ambition that we need. And so yesterday I circulated a letter among colleagues here in the Parliament to call upon the council to really be ambitious for the sake of having a good, solid telecom single market package and also because the telecom single market is an essential building block for the digital single market that everybody talks about but that will not materialize if procedures and decision making are so complex and if ambitions are so low. What I fear and I'll end there is that if we're going to have a major fight over roaming charges, because the gap between the Commission and the Parliament and the council is so great that net neutrality could be snowed under and could be pushed off the agenda effectively because of course and in roaming is very popular it was one of those promises that did make people excited about the European elections about the added value of Europe and we cannot let citizens down. And the same goes for net neutrality. I'm happy to see that there is movement in the United States quite unexpectedly. We're still waiting for the details and the devil is always in the details but I still strive to see European leadership with Dutch example that shows how this can be done in a 21st century way but it needs hard work and we're not there yet so I hope that today's discussions can contribute also to the understanding of the technicalities these details that are so important and that we can work for an ambitious telecom and digital single market in Europe everybody knows it's needed for jobs and for setting ourselves up for the future in an increasingly competitive world I really think the need is great but I'm very disappointed to see what is happening on the side of the ministries. Thank you very much. So we have about an hour out and we want to try and fill that time mostly with discussions and we're trying to get some answers and we'll help you back into this paper but I will introduce the panelists and give them a few minutes just to sit down to your opening comments and thoughts. So at the end here we have Antonio Stossos who is the challenging partner of Rewheel then Kevin O'Brien the combat sheriff but also representing Barrick for each of you all know. Flutus Sorensen is here from the Norwegian Communications Authority and Aydianne-Henrik Jansson is the European director from the Centre for Democracy and Technology who is the closest thing we have to someone coming out of the US because we don't have anyone here representing that side but they do of course have lots and lots of people but let me start, Antonio would you like to kick off and just give us your opening thoughts. Thanks a lot. Thanks a lot for inviting me to speak about the neutrality in this event a few words about Rewheel so we are Helsinki based in and based consultancy to specialise in competition we talk about pro-competitive telecom strategies which is not that obvious always and we tend to say things that nobody else says in the industry so I will also say a few of those things today. The presentation is long there is 10-11 slides I would probably just touch on a few of those slides they will be published so you will have the opportunity to actually read through but the most important point that I would like to make throughout these net neutrality discussions for the last 2-3 years we bring some different angle and we brought that angle because we came to the net neutrality discussion from somewhere else we were looking at prices price of mobile internet in euro and price of mobile internet in euro is greatly divided by a factor of 100 so that is not 10% that is not 50% that's 100 times different European consumers pay from one market to the other in order to access mobile internet so is it possible to move the slides forward how do I do that I can see also that the price is not visible but basically the question that we ask is that do we want competitively price mobile internet access in euro or do we want that very little discriminated for example 0-8 so we move to the next slide here we try to describe in a very simple language what net neutrality should be about and what special services are about so we see 3 3 main attributes of net neutrality we see that shouldn't be any technical discrimination what you call blocking, throttling and pay prioritization there shouldn't be any price discrimination and that's I would say a bit more important than technical discrimination and will tell me why because technical discrimination for example blocking and throttling will never fly it is not possible to actually block a service that consumers want to access and operators will get away with it you know this is simply there will be an outcry if you cannot access a service or if the operators is interfering with the quality of the service that the consumers are trying to so with all regards and all the discussion that happened in the US about pay prioritization bills and fast liens we do not really believe and we have not seen real market examples of pay prioritization bills operators in the US have said they are not interested in pay prioritization and fast liens if you want to believe that however price discrimination is all over the place, price discrimination is happening and it's sitting net neutrality today and I will say few words about that specialised services so it's everything that is not internet based and there is many examples of that I will not talk about connected cars and health services that have not come yet but there is specialised service already that operators are offering and for example voice and SMS legacy voice and SMS it can be considered a specialised service voice equality and other similar type of services the important thing with there is that of course operators should be able within the broadband capacity pipe to do other stuff than internet they shouldn't be forced only to offer internet access the real question is that if they do offer non-discriminatory internet access net neutrality internet access they shouldn't use specialised services to undermine internet access and I will say how we propose to handle that so the biggest for us is volume caps and why volume caps I would like to bring you a real market example from Finland on the upper left left side you will see my mobile data in the conception of February which was 40 gigabytes so I did 40 gigabytes on my smartphone plan 25 euros unlimited smartphone plan from Elisa so in Finland you have three operators Elisa, DNA and Telia Sonera two of those three operators offer truly unlimited smartphone plans for 30 euros and you could do as many gigabytes as you want and there is no tethering restrictions there is no application restrictions no watch however and no ferry users watch however and the third one Telia Sonera offers for 30 euros 50 gigabytes 30 euros 50 gigabytes smartphone plans if you run out of gigabytes and you do run out of gigabytes they sell additional gigabytes at 0.2 euro per gigabyte so these are real prices from a market Finland where it has the highest penetration of mobile broadband where it has the highest mobile data consumption per capita it has reached now at 4 gigabytes per month in Finland so everything does 4 gigabytes per month on their mobile internet subscription and obviously zero rating a net neutrality is not an issue in Finland an unlimited mobile program mobile internet subscription then obviously there is no much to zero rating now that was Finland and then we go to see Europe and we see a great huge difference on the price of mobile internet across Europe from Finland where actually gigabytes are sold below 0.2 euro per gigabyte to Greece where gigabytes cost 70 euros per gigabyte and we have several times over the last 2-3 years keep reiterating these methods and asking the commission when will the commission start measuring mobile internet prices in Europe we do measure fixed broadband prices in Europe but why not mobile internet prices the FCC commissioner just tweeted out that 55% of access in the US happens through the mobile networks so why are we not measuring mobile internet prices in Europe next slide and based on zero rating we have in the digital monitor service that we will publish these measures prices and as well discriminatory practice of operators like zero rating we have counted something like 90 to 0 rating services that mobile operators offer in OCB October 2014 here is just a small snapshot this focuses on video this focuses on mobile TV and film stores that mobile operators in Europe have loans and what we are trying to show here we are trying to show that zero rating is about the price of open mobile internet access you remember Delia Sonera mentioned in Finland 30 euros 50 gigabytes additional gigabytes is 0.2 euros per gigabyte so people can watch as much Netflix and I do as well in Finland as they do on the mobile internet connections because it is affordable so there is no point of discriminating your own film store just people who watch Netflix or who watch anything else however in all other markets in Europe as you see where operators have loans zero rated film stores and zero rated on video services and TV people cannot actually watch other alternatives because it is just too expensive for open mobile internet subscriptions so in most cases they cannot actually buy even more gigabytes so operators are not selling to the consumers more gigabytes now how does that add up so you could only buy 5 gigabytes but no sorry I will not sell you more but I want to buy more as a consumer but I can't so the case over here is that if this is allowed clearly operators will be favoring their own video services and in a way it will be open internet video service like Netflix, Vino and Pluto TV although Netflix as we probably have got zero rated in Australia so you see that it is not that straightforward even the over the top video internet providers are somehow in a kind of dilemma if they don't get zero rated then they will not be favoring so the pressure is very big for them just the list of the 92 zero rated services in our CD and just to conclude on zero rated so zero rating in our view is only competitive because consumer harm because it restricts consumer choice and competitive harm because it plays competitors of the disadvantage the flip side of zero rating and we wrote an article a story about this and this is very important, zero rating is throttling so what zero rating does it is actually a universal throttling of all other services except the service that is zero rated because once you reach your cap all other services get throttled but not the zero rated services so it's actually a different way to throw a lot of things we spoke about this that mobile operators have a fundamental conflict of interest in selling both open internet access and their own services please it's pretty safe for a thing about it if you both try to offer to the consumers open mobile internet access as they do in Finland then you have an interest to actually have gigabyte prices that is affordable for consumers because otherwise they won't be able to use it but also at the same time trying to favor your own services then of course it makes a lot of sense to try to make consumers to be able to buy open internet access if zero rating is not one mobile operators that are incentivized to set low volume gaps pretty safe for what in order to impasse the appeal of their own zero rated services, one zero rating leads to lower mobile internet access prices after ACM in the Netherlands a fine protocol zero rating in HBO and KBM for for some voice voice over IP KBM came out with new ties for the same amount of money that consumers pay before KBM double the volume allowance and said we do that because we want our customers to enjoy free video pretty clear but if you zero rate you still enjoy your free video but it will be your own video so there is evidence already that zero rating is actually increasing mobile competition of open internet and finally we said that there are no trial rules that do not ban price discrimination such as zero rating will be too less different between the US in terms of zero rating I will say a few things from the stuff that we know about FCC rules three right-right rules no block, no product, no pay prioritization zero rating and price discrimination is not included in the right-right rules of the FCC it will be dealt under the open internet contact standard on a case by case when a complaint is filed however FCC senior officials said as reported by Bloomberg when they were asked about zero rating that at the moment their view on zero rating is the following zero rating on or affiliate content is probably not okay zero rating content third party content for a fee is probably not okay but zero rating third party application or application class is the way that Team Mobile US is doing it with zero rating music streaming services and Team Mobile has said that they want to include all music streaming services in that zero rating that's probably okay yes because that's probably not discriminatory so in that case that service won't be discriminatory in Europe though the price discrimination proposal from some small member states doesn't seem to go anywhere as we had earlier and the big member states are not very happy with that one final word about specialized services so in that illustration as you showed there we try to really state that there is license and I repeat the word public spectrum spectrum is a public asset and it has been licensed to operators so operators with that license spectrum they would offer opening the access but also they would offer specialized services now the question is that they should be able to offer specialized services however the question is how much of that spectrum should be dedicated to opening the access and how much of that spectrum should be dedicated to specialized services and the government first reading back in April 2014 had a way to deal with that by trying to allocate priority to opening the access of our specialized services however we feel that that's not enough we feel that it would be better if specialized services are provisioned over dedicated frequency because once they're provisioned over dedicated frequency then they you could not actually interfere with internet access so for example new specialized services like health services and connected cars could be regulators could allocate dedicated spectrum for it and then there is no issue whatsoever there is no issue with discrimination whatsoever whatever they want over those dedicated frequencies and one last point you do not need specialized services to offer higher quality of service dedicated quality of service higher space you could offer all these things you would offer fast lanes on a non discriminatory manner by having net neutrality and I would say more if you wish about that later with the details one last point and I would not elaborate but I would say that if zero rating is not bound we see that becoming a new barrier single market and the logic is very simple the logic is similar to jail blocking meaning that if one service if I get a zero rated Netflix in Belgium the question that I would ask is how would I watch my Netflix if I go to Germany if that operator doesn't zero rate Netflix in Germany I wouldn't be able to do it because it would cost 300 euros to use with open mobile internet prices so zero rating would act the same way that jail blocking is acting is actually segments the markets in many smaller bases and I would believe that it would be possible with vertical discrimination such as zero rating to achieve a single delta market sorry I thought there was five months for ten minutes but that's all okay thank you very much I guess we'll be coming back there's tweeting people commenting about so we'll come back again with some more questions but let's move on Kevin you're going to give us some regulatory point of view and presumably that's quite a challenge and it can be a challenge to your regulator's view that's what it's supposed to be a bit more of a challenge to your 28 European member states which make up Berwick and we do have other measures from the EEA and observers of Berwick so I can't remember the exact figure but we have something like 36 or 37 participants in America there are many views on the Nike Traveling Subject in Berwick and they often reflect what we know the various member state views or the various member states that can some views might be you know the proxy wars happening in Berwick and spilling over from the cancel or elsewhere and so what I thought this morning is to set out at a high level where Berwick is on the matter and the way that we introduce this as experts I think everybody here will be except for myself on head neutrality I would say a little bit about that the extent to which head neutrality comes across the regulator in the day-to-day sense in a few minutes but I am delighted that we have Berwick's member or my experts and you will be representing the Norwegian view and I think that's good because I ended up in TV3 today TV3 or July I think to give his expert views well this morning I sat down on the TV in the hotel for 6.45 and I came out of BBC World which I've been watching the day before and the news was on and they were looking at the papers and they were talking about banks they were always talking about banks on TV and then next thing they were talking about net neutrality and I was kind of like you know you don't see much on TV on net neutrality except perhaps in the last 7 or 8 days and it's very interesting and there was a headline of one of the British papers which I didn't quite see which paper it was but it talked to that there was now a cross-aglactic divide or a cross-aglactic split in relation to the issue of net neutrality and the host of the show said oh the FCC made a decision and I thought the rest of the world would follow suit but it looks like Europe is going a different path so that was the same by this morning in about 6.45 on BBC World which I thought was interesting. Just back to what I said the day-to-day world of the regulator in Ireland and Conrad we have had to do very little on net neutrality and that's there have been a couple of examples that have come to our attention where there was Skype blocking by mobile operation and we did some investigations into that and then the operator gave us some excuses and so on and we didn't go further and there was not a lot of choice in the market at that point in time and so I read and talked about roaming area and roaming is something the regulator can talk about in the case at home, we've taken compliance cases in roaming, we do reports on what's happening in the Irish market in relation to roaming all the time we can talk about roaming about access to universal service but net neutrality is challenging because we're kind of talking about the future rather than the present and I think that's the big debate and we didn't I mean again at a very high level there are a lot of enemies around here that this is this is too important for the types of issues that Antonio has talked about and to gain a foothold that will fundamentally change the open internet experience and people should act now and then there is the other review that choice for the consumer will solve most of the problems and that once you have market places where there is choice then competition will drive away the problems so there are kind of two different at a very simple level the two different positions that we see within Eric I just mentioned the issue of subsidiarity of local rules versus pan-European rules because what we have in the existing framework is the sense that regulators can implement local traffic management monitoring can look for examples where they think the spirit of the framework is reached and intervened but what you have then is kind of an approach based country by country and again as Antonio said that produces differences across Europe so that's one of the big questions facing policy makers today maybe I'll just run a little bit through what Eric has been doing since 2009 on this issue just say a little bit about what Eric is doing at the moment in terms of its work, its detailed work on that neutrality but also where Eric is positioning itself and where Eric has to position itself in terms of engaging with the council, with the commission with the parliament on issues such as net neutrality where legislative proposals are being made since 2010 Eric has done an awful lot of work through its expert working groups on all of the issues that have bubbled up in this net neutrality debate and you can see that on the Eric website so we've done long-range frameworks for the quality of service monitoring we've explored transparency issue in detail and we have looked at competition issues and whether the competition pressures solve problems and we've looked at the incentives of both network operators and over the top players or content and application players and what the incentives are and the pressures are in the marketplace are in these net neutrality issues and at a very high level to mention some of the findings that Eric has had over the last last number of years which you'll find set out in detail in all of those reports there's a view that it certainly will become important and is important that monitoring of traffic management should happen in member states that this is something that needs to be observed it needs to be explored it needs to be reported on there's a real possibility that regulators would have to introduce minimum quality of service standards another very good observation goes back to my first point really is that in a lot of member states NRAs have not really discussed net neutrality because it just hasn't come before them as an issue and whether it should happen is a different point plenty of evidence of time-to-time avoid locking and person-to-person file sharing being chuckled or being prevented and so on again there are different statistics that Eric has published based on questionnaires in relation to this but at a high level there's plenty of evidence and Tony mentioned this where operators have prevented certain services being made available and a very good observation is that these problems have often gone away when there has been focus, when there has been discussion when the NRA has gone and talked to the operators talked about the issue publicly across everything we do as a regulator inherent and again we'll talk about it all the time is the issue of transparency the theory is that the more the consumer is informed the more the consumer is empowered then in a competitive market the consumer will make choices and drive away behaviors that are not in the consumer interest that's the theory I might say a little bit in a while about the experience because it does vary and there are kind of new challenges emerging in Ireland as one of the countries where we have had a 4-3 mobile merger and comrade last year when the merger was next stated it's disappointed with some aspects of the commission decision in relation to that Beric last week held a workshop on other goblies in regulation in the other gobbly markets and certainly net neutrality issue in an other gobbly scenario is one to be considered Beric generally stays away from industrial policy we don't have a remit to promote industrial policy in Europe in fact one of our criticisms of the European commission particularly at the beginning of the connected continent proposals was that the European commission seemed to be moving away from same competition as a way to benefit the European consumer and European businesses and attending more towards industrial policy however there's a recognition with Beric that an open and free internet has to be a cornerstone for any continent's digital industrial policies that is recognized by Beric what I would recommend is that third parties in Ireland and across Europe we will have the classic is the switching site you go somewhere where it tells you where you can get cheaper electricity or gas or it tells you who will give you your program and your TEP cheaper so again from the work where it is done a recognition that third party analysis can inform consumers and help them choose products where any net neutrality issues are emerging and that they are informed that they can choose alternatives if those alternatives are available briefly to say what Beric is doing at the moment we are engaging with the various European institutions on the connected continent package of say something about the moment and how we do it maybe three pieces of work that are in the way at the expert working group level and we are looking at we are doing a feasibility study on opt in monitoring system for Europe so this could be through Beric a European system for monitoring in relation to quality of service and we are also doing work on ecosystem dynamics and demand side focus so we are looking at again the consumer demand competitive pressures and what that might mean for the future in terms of net neutrality issues and we are doing further work on traffic management investigation so I come back to what Beric is doing in terms of our engagement with the legislative making process in Europe we are not we don't create legislation Beric is in fact a creation of legislation in the 2009 package it's important for the group of regulators that were seen to act under the existing law we come together under law with a view primarily to ensure better harmonisation across Europe and to share best practice and so on and so we are cautious when we come down the work of the commission and their proposals when we engage with the council and however we do do it and we've done it recently in relation to roaming and we've done it recently in relation to tank neutrality so if I was just to say what we're saying to the council at the moment key points Beric is making when we see the current council proposals is to ensure good quality of clear definitions because as a regulator the worst thing in life you can have is the loopholes the worst thing in life you can have is legislation that seems to aspire to protect the consumer in a certain way but when you try to implement it you find that it's not clear and it won't stand up in court or indeed it's written in a way that the loophole is so obvious that the operators might circumvent it effectively from the word go so there are certain things in relation to the definition of internet access services there are certain things in relation to the debate between equal and equivalent services where Beric is providing concrete to the council at the moment and our view and that's our combined view of more than 30 organizations on what we think it could be done slightly differently so again we're sharing with that in conclusion I would say two things I would highlight the importance of transparency consumer this runs across all of what regulators do but I would emphasize that transparency alone is often not sufficient the general approach to switching is something that European regulators have worked on for more than 10 years while it exists in theory I can assure you that if an operator wishes to make it hard for consumers to switch broadband or switch mobile they can do it we've taken significant compliance cases in Ireland that were very difficult to get a result from but we did eventually over time so transparency and the ability to switch alone are good but they're not necessarily a panacea and as regulators we need good tools we need tools that are clearly defined and tools that work so that's a big message from us whatever the policy makers land on with the European approach to make neutrality it has to be one where regulators can implement it and can have proper enforcement powers and as I said get the definitions right I know it's problematic because people are coming from different linguistic perspectives and so on it's no longer because of that so be it but having peer definitions so everybody does know what we're talking about and at the end of this process what is legal and what is not legal is peer thank you very much okay thank you we've already heard from Marie Chisse I was skipped to Ford who not in the EU but Norway has in Europe one of the longest running neutrality so who now of you I guess then can we talk about it thank you good morning this is really the morning it's the earliest meeting I've ever had in person if it's a good morning depends on how well you slept this night of course yes I will represent the Norwegian EU I'm also chairing the BEREC working group on neutrality which is expressed here are strictly the ones from the Norwegian regulator NCOM first of all a quick look into the Norwegian view on the next slide NCOM has had co-regulatory approach to neutrality we launched Norwegian guidelines to neutrality in 2009 and it's the longest running in Europe I want to stress that it's a co-regulatory approach so it's neither a law nor a self-regulatory approach so when we say co-regulation it's the regulator together with the industry who has developed these guidelines this means that different from the self-regulatory approach which typically will only focus on transparency issues for example where operators can inform consumers about which services are locked or locked in their office the co-regulatory approach in Norway has produced guidelines that are rather comparable to parliament's decision in 2014 containing transparency of course but in addition to that they allow special health services they are clearly non-locking and non-prolcling rules and we allow reasonable traffic management to some extent taking a broader view on the next slide I tried to compare the European approach to publish FCC rules and as long as the only fixed position we have from Europe is the parliament's position I used that as a starting point and I suppose the discussion today will also touch to council's movements comparing those two approaches we can see clearly that non-locking and non-prolcling is rather similar on both continents and on the US side we have this non-prolcling in addition which has not been touched in parliament's version or in other versions in Europe regarding special health services both continents have some approach regarding that I'll discuss soon the details some of the details that we have been discussing in Europe and there are clearly similar details that are relevant for the US approach but I don't know that so much in detail so I will not go into that today furthermore zero rating has been high on the agenda recently it's also interesting to see how this is handled and we can see that the FCC at least the message we have had so far indicates that they can approach zero rating on a case-by-case basis so-called standard of future conduct and also interestingly they have included some aspects regarding IB to connect where we can see similar effects that we have regarding the neutrality can also to some extent be used in the market regarding connect issues I would like to discuss a little bit in detail two topics first of all the special health services on the next slide special health services are introduced as an extensive exception from net neutrality that should be very clear so when for example in the guidelines in 2012 introduced this concept in order to have a clear opening for operators to launch to provide services that do not need to adhere to the net neutrality roots but in order to at the same time have this opening for special health services and also protect net neutrality there are a couple of aspects that are very important in order to preserve both aspects and those two sub points are mentioned on this slide are quoted from the BEREC documentation so first of all it's important to have a separation between the internet access service and special health services on the network layer that means the traffic is separated for those two services you don't need to build two networks to do that you can use so-called virtual networks to do that the second aspect that is important is of course that the special health services must not be provided at the expense of the internet access service this also relates to the clarity of net neutrality provisions discussed in Europe today we have seen discussions in Europe receiving arguments from both sides in the discussion and we've seen some strange comments regarding the protection we need of special health services since special health services already have built-in quality of service mechanisms but they don't need protection from the internet access it's the other way around we have regulation of net neutrality in order to protect the internet access service that should be very clear this is the Norwegian viewing on to the next main point I want to make regarding application agnosticism where I also touched this zero rating discussion application agnosticism is the traditional way of working for the internet and we can also see how we can in broad line describe what net neutrality is based on this concept so and this also is a way of answering the concern we hear from the operators that they are not able to differentiate their services and there are clearly two ways of differentiating the product line without bridging the net neutrality and this is based on access speed or data volume data volume is typically used in mobile networks any differentiation based on specific content or applications would constitute a bridge of net neutrality and this also explains in one way how we can consider the zero rating discussion in case of zero rating specific content or applications are given they are favored where the providers choose this favoring instead of the end users so in the Norwegian view the end users should decide how they want to use internet access and finally a short element regarding this application and this decision if there is a concern regarding quality of service from operators first of all you can provide quality of service based on specialist services as I explained a very explicit exception from net neutrality but also in addition to that it's actually possible to have so called application where the end user is in control of this quality function however this idea has not been included in either the FCC or the European proposed regulation to net neutrality but it's definitely a possibility to explain in detail in particular about in case you want to study this topic finally concluding on my last slide why is it so difficult to agree about net neutrality is it because we don't understand the value of the internet or is it also to some extent we don't understand how the internet works I don't have an answer to that I'm just asking the question and a couple of elements to consider in that regard is that the internet is completely different from the traditional telecommunications and there is also some word of games going on in the discussion regarding whether we should protect innovation based on neutrality or if innovations should be done internally in the network I acknowledge both the need of both but on the other hand reverse engineering telecoms into IP I don't think that's particular innovative actually furthermore I'm going to describe the essence of how the internet works the applications are decoupled from the underlying network which is completely different from special services which are typically integrated and if we want to protect net neutrality we need to have this independence so that applications can be provided from the edge from the consumers the end users furthermore the internet provides global connectivity and we should try to avoid fragmenting the internet the value of the internet is degraded in case there are logging or throttling or applications on the internet is actually fragmented and finally there is a need for a pan-european approach for net neutrality we should avoid the situation where we have national regulations which differ significantly from country to country in a competition between market competition between Europe and the US we should approach connected continents as is the title of the legislative process and we should ensure a clear net neutrality protection in this regulation thank you thank you so I will move on straight away then to you and Henry you've got the challenge of speaking after everybody else who are in that position please go ahead and be there thanks very much to OFE and thank you for hosting the CDT in the sense of democracy and technology we are a US based organization we have had an officer involved for just about two years so net neutrality has been one of the core issues that we have argued on both sides of the Atlantic and I think that Mauricio summed up the issue extremely well to begin with why this is so crucial I think the only thing I would add to that is a quote by Tom Wheeler recently when he said that neither governments nor corporations should interfere with what we as end users choose to access on the internet that is the fundamental principle that needs to be laid down below on both sides of the Atlantic so we were extremely pleased of course as many other net neutrality advocates with the FCC vote and draft order which we haven't seen yet there are supposed to be 332 pages of it but we are excited about the stance that the FCC has taken it has really tried to build the strongest possible ground to stand on to to guarantee the open internet and maintaining the internet as a permission less innovation platform which is what we have all come to appreciate and what is so crucial to entrepreneurship and democratic debate in this course so as we said in our statement you know this is a milestone position but the efforts to protect the open internet do not end today and so just very briefly on what happens next Congress has apparently decided not to counter FCC with the legislative proposal that was the latest news but there is a very real possibility that Congress will try to defund the FCC's enforcement activities so they will try to put forward legislation which will make it really difficult for the FCC to actually enforce an open internet decision and then there is court cases several SP's people, telecoms companies in the US have said that they will challenge the FCC's order in court so this is very much an ongoing debate an ongoing battle now the issues as the presentations have shown are very very similar both in the US and in the EU although the legislative and legal framework they are completely different I think that the we applauded the commission proposal when it came out in 2013 it was not a given that it would come out it was not perfect much work needed to be done to strengthen that and I think we are extremely pleased with the European Parliament's amendments the tightening of definitions the tightening of language that the Parliament was able to introduce now council we have with colleagues tried to intervene in the council discussions and the process and I think I'd be a little more optimistic than others perhaps looking at where we are today relative to where we might have expected to be because if you look at the amount and the intensity of opposition against any sort of open internet neutrality rule in EU legislation I think it is you know had somebody asked me in September last year whether we would have something like the text that we have from the council in front of us today on the neutrality I don't think I would have expected that I think absolutely there are many many open issues and definitions that need strengthening and there is language that needs to be worked on but I think that there was every risk that we would not get to where we are at this stage and so I'm hopeful that we will be able to address some of the open issues in the negotiations between Parliament and council and we will certainly try to develop there if you look at just a few words on the council text clearly price discrimination and zero rating has been a big discussion in the council working group and as we understand it the square the circle that they tried to square is the problem of a number of countries who would not and commission who would not address price discrimination in this proposal and of course wanting to make sure that countries can address price discrimination issues not clear how you do that and I think one very important question I would like to have and also for the views on that is whether the text that is on the table now that talks about commercial practices and commercial practices that may limit the freedom of users to choose does that provide enough of a book to stand from a way that is from a view does it it doesn't give an obligation but does it give enough of a possibility to be in those cases do we need to try and strengthen and make those decisions clearer the issue that is coming out of the council text is there's a lot of reference to preferred and user preferences we think that may be that may be quite dangerous in the sense that as we know we as users and consumers we're not in the business of expressing a lot of preferences to our to our ISPs we generally have service that is available to us and that is what we will be able to get so we have to be careful not to let specialized services in through the back door by having users take a box somewhere and then have that be a tacit acceptance or a tacit sort of expression of a preference that the ISP can then to prioritize certain traffic over others other so these are the kinds of issues that I think we need to we need to work hard at as we move into the trial hopefully soon so the final thing I wanted to just highlight is the disappearance of specialized services from the council text it is now known as services other than internet access that's an interesting we've had debates among colleagues whether it is workable I think we all prefer their mere definition can we make the text strong and can we make it useful even without the definition of specialized services I'll stop there well actually I think we have a good place to start our discussion part of the morning which is cannot work we've heard some news on what's happening in the council obviously we don't really know exactly what the final text is going to be you mentioned earlier on that you think it's disappointing to the point of insulting what influence can you bring to bear what do you want to see changed as I was listening I think these were excellent presentations so thank you so much it does strike me that of course some of these definitions are also interrelated if there are very firm definitions on how net neutrality should be preserved and that includes restrictions of specialized services we in the parliament had clear text on both because we wanted to make sure that both were clearly defined and restricted and operated as a competition amongst themselves for example equal treatment of specialized services putting specialized services in separate capacity things like that but I think the words of Mr. O'Brien from very good knowledge when he said we need clear definitions and the ambivalence in the current council text is precisely what concerns me because if it is interoperable in many different ways then usually what we see is that the lowest common denominator is sought by those who benefit so by those who think they can use their gamekeeper position in the market those who think that they can strike special deals for zero rating etc etc so what we can do now and this fight is not over but it's also not easy is make our voices heard yesterday I circulated the letter in the parliament we will send out today to all council members which in one day gathered 120 signatures and that's quite a bit I've done letters before this parliament is very keen to see clear definitions of that neutrality it was adopted by the previous parliament but it is clear from also statements related in other contexts we recently had a debate on the internet governance forum of the United Nations it's a different topic in their debate and interventions mentioned the need for leadership and strong definitions of net neutrality the same goes for roaming of course we do not want to see our citizens disappointed by these kinds of proposals and so this fight is far from over the trial will start once the council is taking its position and there will be votes on the final proposal but all in all the fact that this is so slow the proposals are not forward looking but really stuck in the previous century where certain incumbents had a position and those incumbents also happened to be quite close to some of the member state governments some of them being shareholders of these companies I think really makes this a very unbalanced kind of discussion that we must change again I've got a very good point that was made is that this is more about the future of the present we already see the problems in the present if we don't address them now the future will not see a Europe that is as encouraging of innovation I forget who mentioned it but the comment was made that actually oh yeah I think it was Antonius who said innovative services cannot be blocked well they may not be blocked or people may find around it but before they are well known they need to attract investment if the investor thinks that the service will not see the light of day because of practices that are common and also allowed in the market then it may not be blocking the factory even though that still happens but it could be such a discouragement that we have for innovation and if there's anything that we need in Europe it is those startups that create jobs it is those companies that would strengthen the digital single market so all of these issues are very much intertwined at the heart of it should be clear definitions we're very supportive of that and hopefully we can still get somewhere once Council understands what is really going on and how important this is for them when you're talking about definitions let me sort of ask at the Mobile World Congress which is going on in Barcelona as we speak Nokia CEO said completely rubbish net neutrality he said a neutral internet is ridiculous some IP packets are simply more important than others we have heart monitors that need to be framing the debate in terms of you're going to be in trouble citizens if you try and enforce this neutral traffic management plan do you think framing the debate in that sort of way is one of the problems that we start at the other end there introduction I think it is actually useful to try to explain from the spoke about it it is possible to offer quality of service on an application agnostic way Professor Valskevic has described it very nicely and Nokia knows it and that's why I would say it was not at all helpful Nokia CEO statement because they are very well aware of how to do this just to simply say you could have sims and this is happening today mobile operators have VIP customers where with sims with priority that means when there is congestion those sims take priority and that's perfectly ok because it is an end user type of discrimination as you have discrimination in terms of higher speeds high volumes with low price per gigabyte on those warm packages all these things are possible today and can be done I would like to make one note take the opportunity to make the following note if we presume that we are trying to prevent specialized services from undermining the capacity of internet access with the current proposal on the table we should be careful with one thing and that is that without price discrimination doesn't work why because with gigabytes if the volume capacity if you cannot use the volume capacity then you will you can actually prevent the operators to assign the volume capacity to specialized services rather than assigning the volume capacity to internet so if gigabytes are too expensive to buy on the open internet then automatically that means the capacity, the gigabyte capacity goes to specialized services and you can only put in work that proposal without that same as Broder said speed and volume as well does anyone else want to pick up on in the action to those statements from the Nobel World Congress just a very general point to that and where societies consider something to be important and you mentioned the health application and something we do is we regulate the emergency call it aren't as many operators do and we set the price and we look at quality and so on so I mean there is what worse societies think something is particularly important I don't think there's any problem with society in treating the phrase where lawful is used about these kind of debates so society can produce other laws to solve specific problems and then I don't think suggesting net neutrality we can get in the way is the right approach the right approach is society to take those issues one of the questions I came in on Twitter here is from the CCIA the computer communications industry asking why is the EU more comfortable following the US lead and neutrality do you think the EU is following the US lead I mean the timing would appear at the moment that they are but is that just a coincidence you're checking your head I really don't think so we've been working on this for years and if the council for example were to look at the US they would not come up with these kinds of proposals so I think it's a bit an artificial comparison I do think it would make sense to look for how together we could go for a global push for net neutrality we are dealing with the World Wide Web after all and my first priority is to get it right in Europe but if we can look to the rest of the world that's very important so in that sense I think it makes sense but again we still have to see what the details are the US proposal we've heard in all of the presentations and we're very much aware that the devil is always in the details so the vote of the SCC is one step that still has to go to Congress there will be a potential for challenges otherwise so we're not there yet not here in Europe not there in the US but my key priority now is to see Europe going in the right direction and it's not in the US direction it's in the net neutrality direction and it allows us to compare the two well just picking up on the point about non-EU and US context and CDT had a parallel idea in September on this and it's a very different discussion in those countries often because it's not a question of having a neutral or an open internet it's a question of whether there is access to anything at all and then these types of deals between big content providers or patient providers operators become much more they become irresistible in the sense that you get a deal between Facebook and various operators and there is a sort of wall card and there is a low cost access to a number of services it's clearly not something that it doesn't it clearly violates net neutrality principles but it's a completely different discussion if you're going to develop in the country that's important to know and I would also say that just based on discussions with council working group members there are very big differences between countries in terms of broadband roller and there are countries that don't see this as their primary problem because they don't have the broadband capacity in the rural areas and so on and so forth so they're very complex I'm really interested to hear if I may some views on the price discrimination issue and whether what we need to do with the council takes to make it useful to counter the kinds of practices that we're seeing all over all over Europe in the market place do people have good suggestions about that? Well actually we do have a little bit more time we've got a few more minutes before we have to go and get something to eat at this early stage so I'm going to open this up to you if anyone does have comments or questions just do raise your hand if you want to jump in and maybe take up Ian's suggestion that we should look more closely at the council documents what specifically could be changed to anyone? Ian Sandrick's questions comments regarding the council's proposal we have this commercial practices which is mentioned of course it's very general unclear so I don't see how it can be used as a regulatory tool to ensure zero pricing for example but of course the problem in Europe is that there are different views in different countries and I expect that it will be very difficult to achieve a compromise regarding zero pricing for society my main concern actually in the continuation of the legislative process is more related to how clear the definitions are and you also yes, Sandrick mentioned the aspect of that specialist services are no longer explicitly mentioned in the text and I don't regard that necessarily as a problem as long as the text is clear but I'm concerned that it will not be clear and that in fact the so-called specialist services or the non-internet access services might be provided at the expense of the internet access and then actually we are achieving privatisation on the internet and it's not at all never done in the end thank you I would say that the situation in Europe because of 28 national countries it's a bit more complicated in the US and the difference in pricing and the difference position of the operators in different countries makes things more complicated but one note in this referring to the how to achieve the digital single market which we need the single market first we fight hard to create non-terminating monopolies in mobile specific I would say and we are more or less in a better stage today than we used to be customers who switch from one mobile operator to the other easily through number portability with few limitations what will happen when mobile operators vertically integrate each one of them will select a menu of services and applications which they will price discriminate if they could so what that means the new terminating monopoly because once you are a customer of let's say Mobistar and Mobistar let's say that 0 rates Netflix so you want to leave Mobistar and you want to become a customer of base but base doesn't 0 rate Netflix maybe base 0 rates HBO so you won't be able to take those services with you to the next operator that's a kind of a new terminating monopoly and it doesn't have to happen in one country it can even happen within one country so once the customer signs up to specially price discriminated services that does not exist in another mobile operator that means that the only way to switch an operator is to leave those content and services that you had from the previous operator and get a new one and we can really this is basically Balkanized experience in the internet because you can have the same internet experience in another operator and I will be keen to hear the operator's view on this one question just to pick up on that that came in whether net neutrality would be a problem if there was more competition and I was recently at a GSMA event where they suggested there are far too much competition in Europe and it would be fine with just two or three operating can I get your reactions to that also maybe comparing between fixed and mobile access well I mean I think the discussion about competition and then neutrality is a bit of a chicken or the egg if we look at the current practice we see that there is discrimination and lack of competition in many ways because there is a lack of choice for consumers that's an issue so I think we should look at the whole offering of services and not just distinguish between let's say telecom operators and internet service providers because telecom operators are internet service providers and offer telephony and messaging services which are actually decreasing so I think it's a bit of an artificial comparison and if you believe in the principle of competition you have to ensure that it is upheld with whatever is necessary and net neutrality rules that are clear are one option but of course antitrust and other measures that the EU has at its disposal must also be used to ensure that this competition is fair I knew that would happen just one quick comment on the difference between fixed and mobile and obviously mobile speeds are improving all the time particularly 4G rollout however there are different networks and traffic management requirements the engineering is different but I don't think that beyond that statement I don't think it's particularly relevant you can still have applications like mastic approaches in mobile as well as in fixed so the people must appreciate that there's different engineering required, there were congestion and so on but I don't think it's too relevant for the core principles right now but I think one quick comment about it competition is about access revenue so more competition in access revenue of course it is better and one could say as well that it does make the net neutrality case better because the more players the more the possibility there will be a player that will be willing to offer access however net neutrality is not about only access revenue it is about competition and content revenue so that's why competition alone in access revenue will not necessarily remove the incentive of those players in the access layer to actually go as well for a sale of the content revenue Any comments or questions from anyone else in the room just stick your hand up I'll ask you a final question about getting this 28 member states it's going to be a bit provocative to you Marie should the Netherlands have go ahead and call it alone unilaterally before we add any UI net neutrality we've already seen fines for both the phone and others in the Netherlands is that a problem would it be better for all EU member states to come at this together In an ideal world yes having had net neutrality laws enforced and in place for years already across the EU would have had my preference but without leadership there's not much that can happen and I think that we were perfectly legitimate to address the concerns that we found in our market and it is actually all the more disappointing that while the practices in other member states are exactly the same the leadership from those governments is not as strong so I think that Dutch leadership and Norwegian examples as well as later initiatives by other countries in Europe are instrumental in getting to where we are and in that sense I'm happy that we took the lead but it's become of course more important to see it happen in the EU so that we can preserve a level playing field that ensures a future proof regulation to foster not only the telecom single market but also the digital single market and that really you know the gap between the with which in speeches and in press releases everybody promises to deliver this digital single market it is sort of neat that project of everyone now the European Commission has it as a priority it is supposed to create an endless amount of jobs and growth and I believe that there is huge potential so I think it is indeed important to prioritize this but take that and compare it to the actual level of ambition the difficulty of decision making and the lack of willingness of member states to go beyond what they perceive as their own interests is really really worrying not only for the digital single market but really for where we want to go as a European Union as a single market and in that sense I think that this is quite a decisive moment and therefore we have to work to get it right now because it would help pave the way for further important developments Okay I'm going to ask each of you to do quickly sum up but also to give me a final report of your work prediction whether the U.S. decision will have an influence on what the Council is doing and whether that may be positive or negative as you interpret it Yes, well beautifully summed up I fully support that on the I think there is going to be and I think it's part of our job to make sure that there is going to be an influence and that the decisions taken in the U.S. will continue to play a role in the European debate I think it is crucial to to underline that this is about innovation as well as fundamental rights and that this is really central to Europe's future and the successful role of the digital single market it will not happen without a new choice The internet is global and the discussion about net neutrality also tends to be global, we have the FCC and European debate but also other countries and I think Europeans are looking abroad and in particular of course to the FCC and I think it can have some influence on European ideas I think it can and I hope it will be more I think I said the first thing I said was thank you Charlie, it was on the news this morning so it's made it very topical I think it's what folks do and at a sound bite level there seems to be very clarity in what the FCC is saying and I suppose the very message to the legislative legislation makers is to produce clarity I think there is after the 10th of November I think it was 10th of November 2014 when President Obama made that statement so turning back after that it's a matter of time but net neutrality will become low I believe in the US and EU in some time Okay, thank you all very much for that, quite like those last something else, very concise and thank you very much for hosting as I hope it's been really informative for everyone and we should have some practice outside so you're welcome to take around Thank you Oh and yes, continue to chat online on Twitter, use the hashtag NN, EU, US