 Hello. Yeah, I think that works. Great. Yeah, welcome to our talk. We will talk about net neutrality, obviously, with a focus on what happened in the last year and also what happened in the past years in the Netherlands, particularly because they have a net neutrality law for quite some time now, and we want to look at the experience, what sessions can be learned from it, and also look at the more global and European perspective. But first to us too. My name is Thomas Lohninger. I am based in Vienna and work there for Initiative for Net's Freiheit. I'm also a member of Digital Gesellschaft here in Germany, and I had the privilege to work with European digital rights in their Brussels office during the hot phase of the negotiations about the telecom signal market proposal, the net neutrality law in Europe that we will talk about. So, I'm Rejo Zenger, and I'm working for Bits of Freedom. We are a Dutch civil rights organization, and because lots of topics which have an impact on the Netherlands are coming from a European level, we are also working a lot in Brussels with ADRI and other organizations. And at the end of this talk, we would like you to remember two things. So, the first thing would be ordinary citizens put net neutrality on the political agenda before, and we need to do that again. The second thing I want you to remember when you leave this whole is there are a number of unsolved issues, and we need your expertise to solve those. But first, let's get back to what is net neutrality. Yeah, we have a simple definition here from thisisnetneutality.org, which is sort of a website of the global coalition on net neutrality where NGOs from all around the world assemble to fight a more globalized battle when it comes to open internet and freedom online. And basically it states that we have to keep the internet open as a platform and prevent discrimination from all sorts. You can also look at net neutrality from its principles, and they are really free principles. First is end to end. So, the internet different than other networks, like for example the TV network is a network of peers, where every end note has the possibility to make a connection to any other end note. And there is no centralized control. There is no one single authorization hub where I have to register, where I have to ask for allowance for every connection that I want to establish, instead it's left up to the end notes to decide whether a connection is legitimate, is correct, is legal. This is both a technological decision, back in the days when the internet was invented, it served the purpose of implementing the optimal network design, because we didn't have the calculated power to make decisions in the network cups, but it's also a political decision about disabling control within the network. The second principle which is tied into that is the best effort. Best effort means that within the internet, within the transit notes, there should be no differentiation between packages. So, every data packet is transmitted like every other, and there should be no distinction based on the protocol or the source or the destination or presumed legality of the packages. This best effort principle also applies not only to technical discrimination but also to economic discriminations, because what we see increasingly is that the price of certain data packages varies, that some packages cost more than others. There's a practice called zero rating, where certain services are excluded from your monthly data cap, so even if you have no megabytes left for this month, you can still use Facebook or Spotify and stuff like that. And there's a third principle that is essential for understanding the debate and that's the reason why we have to fight this fight, because providers want to vertically integrate along the value chain of their network. They see how much money can be made with us as consumers, with us as users who give away their data, and they just want to have a piece of cake, they want to have a piece of the profit that Google or Amazon are making with us over their network, so in a way they see us as their captive audience, and their goal is to establish a kind of double-sided market where they sell us, their customers, to the service providers that want to reach us, or don't just sell us internet instead, they also want to sell us each individual service that we want to use. We put these in pictures, and you might know that because it's a very popular image, it was created several years ago, and we were often called fee-mongers for putting something like that out. You have to pay if you want to play World of Warcraft, or if you want to read the New York Times, so every single service suddenly has a price tag on the internet. But sadly, this has become reality. This is an offer of T-Mobile Hungary. There are even worse offers from Orange France, where you have each individual type of service with a price tag. These are actually not euros, these are Hungarian for rent, but Google Translate, thank you. But we have seen a huge increase in the products in Europe that violate net neutrality. According to the digital fuel monitor, there are a little bit above 100 of such net neutrality violating products right now in Europe. So this is a debate which is happening really fast, and the market is creating facts. The longer politicians wait to establish any meaningful legislation that would safeguard net neutrality, the longer is their window of opportunity to just create new facts and abolish the principle of net neutrality. But now on the bright side, to the Netherlands. So that doesn't happen if you have net neutrality enshrined by law, and that's what happened in the Netherlands. We have this law since 2013, sorry, it went in effect at the beginning of 2013, so we have this law now for about two years. That didn't just fall out from the sky. This law came there after a long debate. And the debate, we couldn't do that by our own, as a bit of freedom. We have been doing this with lots of work with volunteers. So two years before this debate started, we already wrote down a position paper in which we said why net neutrality is important and how it should look like. That position paper was written with the help of volunteers. And when KPN announced they were planning to monetize the use of WhatsApp by their users, people got angry and we were able to build a campaign site and have those people explain their angriness with the politicians, with members of parliament. And only because all those people did that, it became a topic on a political agenda. And that's very important to remember because it shows that if you are angry about something and you tell politicians about it, then something can change. And without you speaking out that change will not happen. So then what actually we have in law? To read a law it's very important to look first at the explanatory memorandum. It's a kind of addendum to the law and which explains why you have this law. And in the Netherlands the law that explanatory memorandum is very clear. It says the net neutrality article aims to maximize the choice and freedom of expression on the internet for end users. It also says that end users should be able to decide what content they want to send and receive. So if there is something unclear about a text in a law, if there are different interpretations of that law, then the lawyers will look at this explanatory memorandum to see how they should decide on that. So this text in this explanatory memorandum is a very important part of the law. The law itself says providers of internet access services do not hinder or slow down applications and services on the internet. So they are not allowed to block access to specific websites. They are not allowed to throttle access to other websites. And of course this is a rule, so there are exceptions. And in this case there are four exceptions. I will mention two of them. The first exception is to minimize the effects of congestion. So think of a location where you have only a limited amount of capacity. Think of a music festival. You have lots of users in a very short period on a temporary... You have temporary lots of users in a small location and the capacity of network may not be sufficient for all of the users. So network operator in that case may restrict traffic, he may restrict access to certain websites. But that's the second half of this sentence. It's important then that equal types of traffic that they are treated equally. And that means if such a network operator would decide to block access to YouTube he would also need to block access to similar websites like Vimeo. The second exception is to preserve the integrity and the security of the network and the service of the provider or the customer premises equipment. So the router of the customer. Think of a slash 24 that is hijacked and that is only serving nasty malware. And the nasty malware may be of harm to the network. In that case the provider may choose to block access to that network. And then there's one other part in the provision which is very important. It's this one and it says providers do not make the price dependent on the services or on applications which are offered or used. So a provider is in the Netherlands not allowed to make available a new service which is competitive to the ones already on the internet and not charge for that one while charging for the other ones. Or if they get into agreement with, for example, Spotify, not charging for Spotify. So that would be in just like Thomas already explained, it would not get off from the data cap you have. So how does it compare to other laws around the world? We made a little comparison chart about how these different laws compare to each other. And here you have like most of the natural legislations that are around the world right now. And it's not only just laws, it's also what we call soft law like self-regulation where the regulator and the ISPs come together and make some rules and then the ISP decides that he wants to follow this. Like a little bit like couple social responsibility. We decided we don't want to do the nasty stuff. These soft laws usually have the big problem that they are not enforceable. Norway was the first country ever in the world to do anything about net neutrality back in 2008. And they also have this big ISP called Telenoa. And this one just decided he want to step out of the soft regulation and just basically do whatever he wants. Telenoa was also the second ISP after Comcast to go into an agreement with Netflix. So soft laws don't work, hard law is the only stuff that really matters. Then price discrimination. That's exactly what Reo just mentioned before. That I don't discriminate based on the network, on the technical side but only on the economical side with the pricing of certain data packages. And there we see that Chile and the Netherlands have really good solutions found for that. The Netherlands honestly is one of the best in the world. And on the other side particularly there where we have soft laws, this is not in the scope. Then prevent too wide SS. SS stands for specialized services. I'm sure you heard of that. Specialized services, we all know it as triple play. If you do not only buy internet from your ISP but also your telephone and your TV this is called a triple play or a specialized service because there are other services running through the same pipes but they are not internet, they are something different. So what qualifies a specialized service, it is special. It's not just another random online service that we know from the internet. And under this category also legitimately fall things like telemedicine. If you want to do an operation, you don't want to do it over the internet. Like self-driving cars and industry 4.0, whatever that means. If it's a critical thing then you don't want to run it over the internet then it is a specialized service because it's set apart from everything else that's happening on the internet. But there's a problem with that. Although we have this nicely laid out concept which is also historically has been the way in which regulators looked at the market and looked at what internet service providers did all around the world slowly these barriers between online services and specialized services have weakened and things have been reclassified. And these days we see stuff like Spotify, like Zutters, like Dailymotion being operated under the category of specialized services or managed services, whatever you want to call it. And they're just abusing these loopholes which often also exist in net neutrality legislation. This is a huge thing for the European debate we'll come to in a minute. So with this knowledge what specialized services are we can go back to the table and see that Slovenia is actually the best country that managed to distinguish these two types of services. And the Netherlands and Chile which have in principle really good legislations just don't have this in their scope because usually you also don't have to regulate specialized services. If you just want to keep the internet open and free you can do this with plain and simple non-discrimination rules and if the regulator does its job well then usually you don't have to worry about just reclassifying services. Just to go a little bit in the other columns blocking of competitors is usually something which comes with every net neutrality legislation. You all know that if you think Vodafone is here in Germany if you have a contract and they prohibit you from using Skype or any other voice of IP service so that you have to use their expensive roaming instead of going to a competitor. That's a widespread practice here in Europe that you block your competitors in the terms of services so that your customers have no freedom of choice and cannot switch to another service. There are only these two laws in Europe in the Netherlands and Slovenia. UK and Switzerland have some non-functional soft regulations and funny enough South Korea is the only country in Asia that ever touched the subject and will go to the Latin American countries later but now to the European debate. That's really where the meat of this talk lies. In September 2013 the European Commission proposed new regulation called Telecom Single Market that's a huge legislative package which regulates stuff like roaming, acquiring spectrums but also net neutrality. But sadly the net neutrality parts of this law were really like the opposite of net neutrality. They would allow ISPs to basically do everything they want to have their vertical integration and establish themselves as gatekeepers what we can do online. So we were really outraged about this proposal and then we decided a year ago here in 33 Free to start a campaign. More or less we launched a campaign. It was already up there a year ago and you can still find it at www.savideinternet.eu and this campaign really tipped the favour in the European Parliament. We wanted citizens to first get them informed about what's happening here and also get them engaged and do something about the internet. We offered them three ways of doing that. First of course they could send an email to their parliamentarians and also they could call them free of charge. And the really funny thing was that we also had the possibility of sending faxes to the offices of the MEPs and this was funny and this was new because in the European Parliament it's like the fax machine is also the printer so you cannot really disconnect the fax machine without also disconnecting the printer. And so people could just go to the website. We had some boilerplate texts which were also at the current debate like which committee is discussing what but people could also just put in their random messages and make their message come out physically in the office of the MEP. And this was huge success. Here's some facts about it. Over 40,000 faxes were sent out. At least from 21,000 we can say for sure that they were also delivered because we only had three SS7 gateways so at the high peaks there were much more faxes that we could send through but still this is a lot of paper and dead trees. The website we had, Safety Internet was translated in nine languages and I want to touch on this subject because particularly for this technical audience this might be interesting. The whole website was on Github so the source code of our campaign website was on an open source collaborative portal and so everybody could look at the source code propose changes and we also had a readme section where you could learn how to translate the whole website and that's the reason why we managed to have nine translations even in Albania they're not even part of the EU but somebody from Albania thought this is an important issue I want my people to be informed about it. So I think this is really a best practice for the Digital Civil Liberties community that we should open source our campaigns not only that others can learn from it but also to allow other people to to get engaged and maybe elaborate on language, on languages or just find typos. And yeah, I mentioned before that I had the privilege to work in Brussels with the European Digital Rights Office and we did a lot of advocacy work there. You have to understand E3 European Digital Rights as well as ExisNow are the two only organizations that take care of our civil liberties within Brussels in the European bubble and they do tremendously important work and we did so many things over these months but few on a highlight because they're all the best practices we analyzed each and every amendment that was tabled to the legislative text we wrote booklets, we wrote many one pages to get small and medium sized companies involved in the debate. Net neutrality is also a competition issue and they helped us a lot because suddenly it was not just left liberal civil liberty people calling the MEPs, it was companies from their own country telling them I will lose my existence or I will have much harder time competing online if you pass this legislation and this helped a lot and one thing why this lady here Neely Cruz the commissioner for the digital agenda back then is on the beamer right now is that we also had many lobby documents that we created to kind of keep ahead of the narrative which was always pressured because the telco lobby was always fighting with us, it was a really short term battle and we had one really good trick which worked well which was that we made our messages funny we wrote subtitles to speeches of the commissioner which not only showed real meaning of what he was saying but they also were funny, they revealed the truth and the assistants liked them, the assistants sent it around to their friends in the parliament and so our messages spread really widely much faster than they would usually do we have to look at the time but to finish up with Europe that's basically the outcome that we had we won in plenary with the votes of the social democrats the liberals, the greens and the left and we got real net neutrality you will see it later in the legal comparison this is a huge success because nobody believed that we would actually make it in the European parliament it was so close to the election, it's such a complex issue but still because people got engaged we could turn the favour and the parliamentarians passed a really good text thank you still the text is not perfect because enforcement is weak but we'll come to that later first I want to go to the basic principle of how a law is done in Europe, looks like that the commission proposes legislation, only the commission can do that and then it has to go through the parliament where all the representatives that we all vote sit the 751 people and we have the council where the 28 member states sits so mostly the ministries when it comes to net neutrality it's mostly the economic or the infrastructure ministry that deals with these things so currently we are at this stage the commission proposed really shitty text which would kill net neutrality the parliament saved it and now it's up to the council because it's 1-1 and the council is the fight where we are right now and to give you an overview again in the same scheme as before the commission proposed something really bad which basically fails on all levels the parliament did a great job they put the solution forward then the Italian presidency had two proposals more or less both of them were shit and then the Polish and the Dutch government came forward with really good language they oriented themselves on the Dutch legislation and really proposed a good text we're speaking of October, November here and it really looked good back then but this December Germany put forward a text which changed the whole game because Germany proposed a text which would basically allow all sorts of discrimination on all levels they even allow blocking your competitors which is something most national legislations would never do even the Italians allowed that but the Germans still would allow that in their text and the real satirical thing is that they're selling this as a compromise Merkel is saying this is a compromise between the internet society and the industry lobby it is not a compromise, not even closely and we have to call them out particularly the social democrats because it's Sigma Gabriel who is negotiating this and the social democrats still have some pressure points they still feel something I think the conservatives are lost in this issue but with the social democrats I think there is still hope and this is an issue which has to be resolved within Germany in the council we have some other big countries which are opposing us and so if Germany is following up on this line the outlook is quite bad so safety internet was like relaunched in the worst in 2.0 and we now have a new website which allows you to send emails to the ministries and the permanent representatives of your country again you have boilerplate emails but it's better if you write your own text why you think nationality is important from your perspective and just to summarize the European stuff there is a basic friends, a basic goal behind what the commission and Germany as well as the UK and Spain all countries with big incumbent telcos like Deutsche Telekom like Vodafone, like Telefonica big ISPs that are domestically engaged they all want market consolidation this means instead of the like 150 small and medium ISPs that we have right now in Europe they want to shrink it down to just 4 big pan-European ISPs very similarly to the way the American market is structured right now there are several reasons for that they believe that this will boost economy economy of sales it would create more jobs and ultimately it would lead to more infrastructure investment they know that it will cost billions to make Europe fit when it comes to fiber to the new bandwidths that we all need for the 21st century they believe this bet that if we give the ISPs regulatory holidays they will just start investing in infrastructure the second summary you have to take is that we suck in the council we are really good at getting people engaged to the commission and also to the parliament but when it comes to the council we are all 28 member states sit as internet society we don't have the capacity or the architecture to really put pressure on them organizations like Greenpeace can do that because they are in every country we still have to catch up in this regard because we see this not only in net neutrality also fight about data retention and data protection were similar and I have to hurry up national fallbacks are necessary because if we fail with this law the earliest we will get european legislation that would safeguard net neutrality is 2018 and remember what I said before the market is creating facts so we may not have time until at the earliest. So maybe national fallbacks are necessary to at least keep the principle of life in some European countries. Now, to the Dutch experience. So before we had net neutrality in the Netherlands, the telcos were explaining to the people like if you have net neutrality by law then your subscription will be a lot more expensive than it is now. And I can tell you our experience, that's not the case. Maybe it has become a bit more expensive, but definitely not that expensive. That is a lot of difference. But what did we experience? So the Dutch law is being enforced by an array named ACM. It's the authority for consumers and markets. And I would say that the enforcement is mediocre at best. There have been five investigations have started and three of those are still underway and only two of them have a ruling. One of those rulings is quite good, the other one is surprisingly bad. The first one is with internet in a train. And internet in a train in the Netherlands is more like this. So the internet in a train is offered by T-Mobile via the mobile network. And of course that one is limited and is frequently changing capacity that is available. And without network management, of course, that will be not working at all. So the Dutch railways is blocking access to video websites and is filtering file sharing protocols. And the question brought forward to the NRA was, is that a violation of net neutrality? The NRA said, we believe that in this case, blocking and delaying services that require large capacity is necessary to minimize the effects of congestion on mobile connection. So the NRA said it's not a violation because, for one, it's necessary because there's a limited capacity available. And second, because blocking and slowing down is done indiscriminately. So this is not a violation of the Dutch net neutrality law. And I think that sounds reasonable to me. The other case is CIS, which is kind of a brand of the telco phone and the content provider RTL. Their offer is a subscription where you can have voice, text and internet access on your mobile phone. And in addition to that, you can get an app. And the app allows the customers to watch RTL content without charging the customer's data plan. So you get that RTL content for free. In other words, that's what they call zero-radar or sponsored data. That's a clear violation of net neutrality, of course, both in the principle and the net neutrality law in the Netherlands. But the NRA's response to this one is a bit curious. In the end, they say, photo phone will end this violation by offering the CIS app as a separate service, which can be used independent to the internet access service. So the NRA agrees that this is a violation and something needs to change. CIS may proceed, provided that the CIS app is offered as a separate service. They name it like that. So practically, that means that you as a consumer may get a subscription where you can get data, sorry, where you can get voice and text, and you can get the app and see the RTL content, even if you don't have internet access on that subscription. But it also means that if you have a subscription where you have voice, text, and internet access, you also get this separate service for free. And that means that in the end, nothing has changed because you have subscriptions with full internet access and access, and RTL app with content comes free. So in my opinion, this solution, they thought of, is not a real solution because net neutrality violation is still intact. So it's a horrible ruling, and I've been told that the Minister of Economic Affairs wasn't amused when they became aware of this ruling. So we'll have the open debates. In the Netherlands, the Ministry of Economic Affairs is drafting a new policy document which would make some of those edge cases which are not clear now, which would clarify those situations. And there are three topics which are mentioned in this document. First of all, the question, should ISP that provides you with net neutrality connection, should they do also IPv6? Should they be forced to provide IPv6? The government says, okay, that's not the case because IPv4 and IPv6 is what is used as a transport layer, and net neutrality is only about the services that are used that are provided over this layer. So IPv6 would not be a requirement if you have net neutrality. The other thing they are discussing is what exactly is an internet access service. So that's the word that is used in the law, but it doesn't have a definition. So they are debating on what is actually an internet access service. So the internet in a train, that's a clear example. Everybody agrees that's something which should be where net neutrality should apply, but for example, internet access in a hotel, that's a different case and they haven't yet decided. I think this will, in the end, the internet access in a hotel will not have the net neutrality law applied. And then the CIS app already mentioned, and also what Thomas already mentioned, you have these separate services, managed services, single services, and I think that the policy document that is drafted now will provide more clear structural that as well. Now we go to the global debate. I think you may have noticed that there was something going on in the US. Verizon succeeded in killing the old regulation about net neutrality in the US. They just said that this hinders their freedom of speech to discriminate the content within their networks and they actually got through with it and they killed the old regulation that the American regulator FCC proposed. And then this huge battle started in the US where also, again, a lot of civil society was engaged. Our sister campaign, safetyinternet.com was revised. And many civil society groups as well as Silicon Valley joined into the fight because the new rules the FCC proposed were really horrible, similarly to what the Germans just proposed. So the commission originally put forward. And then also things happened like John Oliver touched the issue of net neutrality in his very popular daily show. And this all spiked and aggregated so that around 4 million comments were submitted to the consultation the FCC had put up for the new rules. And in general we can say the question in the US really boils down to public opinion versus industry lobbying. There is no question about the public opinion. Even in conservative Republican circles net neutrality is seen as a good thing for competition for freedom of speech for various reasons. But still the industry lobby manages to make it a political issue and still delay the decision. And then Obama came out and like publicly said net neutrality is important and we have to make it a law. And the rules he proposed in his statement also look really fine drafted like he understood the problem and proposed a real solution. But sadly he is not the person to decide. It's this guy whom he appointed Tom Wheeler the current chair of the American regulatory authority FCC. It's his decision whether or not we'll have net neutrality in the US or not. And we'll see I guess in 2015 this decision will fall either way. But it's definitely boils down to versus public opinion versus industry lobbying. But it's not just the US and the you. This debate is global. And particularly in African net neutrality is a huge issue because most people there don't have any internet access at all. But what they sometimes have is so-called Facebook zero where everything they have from the internet is just Facebook or Google or Twitter. Those big companies that can afford to pay for the data that the customers need to reach them or the users need to reach them. Those put up crazy stuff like Zeppelin's that get their internet from a satellite and then project a GSM network in really rural areas. They really take money in their hands to bring internet in rural areas but not really internet. Only their services. And so there is a huge part of the population in some areas which only has net which only has these services that's everything they know from the internet. And this is really important if we look at development theory. I mean I'm an anthropologist and this is a topic close to me. What we are doing in the global south is establishing new dependency circles. We're making these economies dependent on us on our western services. We actively prevent local services to come up startups in Africa that come up with the real needed services that the people have. They're good examples for that. Africa has established elaborate SMS payment and information systems. SMS is often the only means of communication that people have electronically. And still they managed to compensate with these tools. The fact that most Africans don't have bank accounts. So there is a real need for modern telecom communications technology in this continent. But still the way this is heading is making global south even more dependent to western companies. And this is similarly in a way the case in Asia. We're also zero rating is really common. But the net neutrality debate is not. South Korea is the only country that has legislation on this topic. And it's not really good. And in general the net neutrality paradigm is not really widespread in Asia differently. So in Latin America as I mentioned before Chile was the first country to make a law about net neutrality and actually a quite good one. It was copied by Peru and Ecuador. Recently also Brazil adopted the Marco civil constitutional law about Internet which also includes provision about net neutrality. And also Mexico recently put a law forward which is not good but still they did something on this topic. So Latin America is a really interesting area when it comes to net neutrality. Another final thing I want to mention is probably something a little bit heated but I feel really strongly about it and I want to speak out about it. We all love Wikipedia and but sadly there is a stain on that law at least for me. Wikipedia zero is a product of Wikipedia. It's a project which they run where they do exactly the same as Facebook basically. They pay for the data that or they they make agreements with ISPs. There's actually no money flowing but they make agreements with ISPs so that Wikipedia is excluded from any data charges. So if I have a feature phone and I have only a contract where I have a few SMS and a few minutes per month I can phone with somebody and I have no Internet. I can still see Wikipedia. I can still edit Wikipedia. But that's the only thing I see from the Internet. Of course they're doing this to foster the sum of all human knowledge. They want to get their market, their service out there to more people. Like Facebook they see that only one billion people is in the Internet but there are much more people in the world and so why don't we try to reach those? Ultimately it's also about brand establishing themselves in these new markets which will soon have Internet and hopefully will develop. But imagine if Encyclopedia Britannica had a service like this ten years ago. Something like Wikipedia never could have come into existence because there would already be one incumbent player that's hugely dominant that has a free access to all the customer base. It doesn't matter if it's the best service but it's free and so people will use that and Wikipedia as a community project never would have taken off and come to the point where they are right now. So the reason I mean this is all known for quite some time but the reason why I wanted to mention this here is because of this letter. Chile amended its net neutrality law to prohibit price discrimination zero rating. They want to outlaw that as well. And Wikimedia actively engaged in the policy debate in Chile and fought this amendment, fought civil rights legislation to keep loopholes in there that would allow them to offer Wikipedia zero. And this was the tipping point for me but well thought this is not going in the right direction. If public foundation actively engages in a policy battle uproar in another country to fight good legislation that has been pushed for by civil society we really have a problem we have to talk about. And also even if we accept the basic premise that Wikipedia zero is a good thing it's hard to question whether Chile is the right country for it because Chile is not Africa. In Chile you have to spend like two percent of your monthly income to afford a mobile prepaid internet subscription. That's similar to Denmark. You know we're not speaking of a country where there is no internet. In average per hundred people in Chile they have 130 mobile subscriptions. So we're not speaking of a developing country. Still I've been at Wikimedia and I've talked with people from the foundation that are tasked with dealing these things and they are country criteria for which countries Wikipedia zero is considered or not. They said they would publish them actually so far they've done nothing. And I think to end this debate we have to go back to the vision statement of the Wikimedia foundation. Imagine the world in which every single human being can freely share the sum of all knowledge. This is our commitment and I'm questioning whether the sum of all knowledge can only be one service of the internet because what they're doing is also they are opening the floodgates. Facebook zero is right behind them. Once Wikipedia zero is established in a country there is no way you can prevent Facebook zero from following on their steps. And so we really have to look at the larger picture here whether we want to continue in this direction. And I also have to say that there is a battle within Wikimedia and it's mostly the foundation and some lawyers within the foundation that are pushing for this. On local chapters it might look differently. So for time constraints I'm gonna do this quickly. So remember at the beginning I was talking about the two things you should remember when you're leaving this room. The first thing was ordinary citizens put nationality on the political again before and we need to do that again. So that's what Thomas discussed about the European legislation. If we want nationality enshrined in European law then you need to get in touch with your ministries in your member state because only that will make them convinced that the people that you think in an opportunity is important. So you need, so you can do that. So go to the website safetyinternet.au and help make this point. If you want to do more get in touch with your regional, national, digital civil rights organization and do and help them with whatever you're good at. And if you can't spend any time do a donation and help them financially. The other thing I mentioned in the beginning was there are unsolved issues in civil society needs your expertise. So one of those unsolved issues is the one that goes on the problem with peering and transits. I'm not gonna into details on that now but if you want to help think with us on that then come to Noisy Square tomorrow at five where we have a workshop and where we will discuss that problem. For now question everything. Thank you very much. Even though it took longer than initially planned we still have quite some time for questions. Let's start here in the hall on Mike three and then go to the internet. Yeah, there's a couple of things which are quite important for network networking as well. There's first you want to have a level playing field not just at the IP level but also also in the fiber. So I think probably some of you already know stock up which is in Stockholm they have a municipality owned fiber operator and that's like ten years ago already it was very common in Stockholm to get a fiber to home at that time it was a hundred megabits or something like that but that's kind of critical also if you look at the new US market the Google fiber is doing the same thing over there. That's some other points as well but there's also the complaint that operators always keep complaining about how they can't profitably run something. It's important to tell them that okay fine we give that job to somebody else because the not just the fibers but just about every service you can if you level the playing field there will be someone who wants that market and at the moment if Deutsche Telecom tells you that they can't do it then in the process you can also screw the Deutsche Telecom which is very big benefit. Okay, that's... While you think of an answer can a police remind everybody who is leaving be quiet thank you. Just some question one comment about what you said and particularly mentioned Stockholm. Personally just as a note I think functional separation is something we should aim for and I would like to see functional separation in the political programs of political parties because that's honestly the only real solution for the competition problem. As long as a company owns the infrastructure and also provides the access service over it there will be no real competition only if you separate those two you can really adequately assess the cost of infrastructure investment you can have a logical decision about where to invest in infrastructure and you have a raise to the top instead of to the bottom when it comes to offering the maximum bandwidth technically possible. Now a question from the internet. Is this on? Yeah. There's one question whether there is collaboration sought with the internet society the ISOC to gain people power for Brussels? We particularly access now is working on this field with the international internet bodies there's also the net neutrality coalition which was founded to more foster the academic debate but they're also close to all the ITF and similar bodies and there has been talk about like establishing neutrality as a basic principle on a UN level but these are all long-term programs and usually they don't kick back towards the real hard national or super national policy debates that we have in Europe or in the US. Definitely for the long term I think this is something we have to look at but short medium term I think not much will happen there. Now on microphone one please. Thank you very much thank you for your talk and thank you for the great work already done for the European Parliament. Now the fight is in the council that means that the fight is in all of the European member states the problem is that we need to organize the fight that you did in the Netherlands for each national state. How do we do that? How do we engage consumer organizations and make this about competition, equal markets and consumers because they weren't part of the organizations that you mentioned there. We actually established an answer to that it's a global coalition on net neutrality which is a network of NGOs all around the world that care about net neutrality. A good example is recently in Tunis an ISP proposed new products which is very similar to the ones that KPN ISP in the Netherlands proposed that kind of pushed the debate towards the point where the net neutrality law was established and because we had this global network we could provide the local Tunisian NGO with all the information all the arguments all the materials they needed to quickly respond to this threat. So this is a global debate and we'll see it pop up in many more countries and I think only global collaboration and information sharing and open source can help to really win this battle because the other side has so much more money than we. So and in addition to that Thomas already mentioned during the talk that we suck at the council that's a problem which is not limited to net neutrality debate only. So I think that the NGOs in Europe need to make an effort there and see and see how we can do this better. And so for the Netherlands it's fairly easy we are a fairly professional organization but it's not just about the Netherlands it's also about other countries where other member states where they have less organizations. So I'm not sure what the actual answer is to your question but it's definitely a hard one and definitely one we need to fix. Now back to Mike three. Well the comment on the train they could just be as prescribed with bandwidth limits but my question is that is there any exemptions for emergency services in zero rating for example because on the traditional land twice calls you don't even need a subscription or even a sim card in your phone to call the emergency services so there's exemptions like that around. And what about costs pricing to things differently based on the cost of providing the service for example could I give my lodger one megabit even a cable to my 10 megabit ADSR line but they still act as my fees each as much faster fees because local traffic is much cheaper to provide so can local traffic be higher bandwidth? The scale could apply to interplanetary traffic as well as well as that for example. So I'm not sure what I understand the question correctly but if it is that you could make a difference in in a subscription for local traffic and have a different price attached to that compared to traffic which is non-local then I think that is not a good idea but and they would not work for the within the Dutch rules we have now. But I'm not sure if I gave an answer to your question. I make another attempt to answer what I understood. I mean we had this usually net neutrality legislation doesn't prohibit you from for example prioritizing emergency numbers or also to like if you have SSH sessions which you need to administer the infrastructure those of course can be prioritized. These things which fulfill a purpose and you then implement this purpose application agnostic so to all providers and protocols which fulfill this purpose then that's totally in line with net neutrality application agnostic you can do a lot of things particularly when it comes to that and to that to the payment part I was not not totally sure what you mean it it's definitely not in line with net neutrality that you pay according to the geographical distance the data is flowing or the I mean of course an ISP can differentiate themselves from the bandwidth they are offering you the access technology they are offering you these things are okay it starts getting critical when you look inside the data stream and you make a differentiation between the service that you actually use in this pipe. I don't know answer this. Can the charge stiffly for different pipes out then that's right no no no and usually you have like the abstraction layer you often don't know which which local physical pipe any connection will run through and within one session the actual physical route that a package is taking can change so this would not work. Okay time is getting close to an end but microphone 3 please. Okay I'm working for a small ISP actually and we are fully supported in neutrality and my you took the answer to my question right now my question is if we take all packages equal three all packages equally then maybe voice or IP calls may get some bad connections and if you would implement the quality of cells for this would this fulfill the mind of net neutrality or would it be some things broken. So remember the explanatory memorandum I showed in the beginning that tells what the goal is of the Dutch net neutrality law. So the goal is again to maximize the freedom of speech the freedoms of the internet user. So with that in mind doing quality of service to a certain extent is acceptable because it will improve this freedom. If you would not apply this quality of service then the freedom would deteriorate. So for example voice over IP it's very helpful to do some quality of service there because otherwise you can't make a call and doing the quality of service you provided you do this for all four in the same way that will help freedom so that will be okay. And one last question from microphone to please. Well it's not the question is more like a comment I've seen I think you did the talk last year on this one right well back then it seemed like everything is doomed and nothing can be changed anymore and I was quite surprised coming here today and hearing all this stuff because my sort of my attention drifted away from it and all I wanted to say is like thank you for whatever you did it's just magic that it happened to be like this right now. So again it's not what we did or did not only it's what you did yes because all of you went to right went to save the internet you and send the facts to the members of Parliament yeah and that made a change and if you didn't you have to do it now. Unfortunately that's all the time we have so once again thank you for your talk and for your input and the political work of everybody here.