[x-pubpol] NYT: Telecoms Want 'Net Neutrality' Applied More Widely

[Joly MacFie]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/17/technology/telecoms-want-net-neutrality-applied-more-widely.html

BERLIN — Neelie Kroes, the European commissioner for digital policy, has
urged lawmakers in Brussels to fast-track legislation to guarantee network
neutrality — the equal treatment by telecommunications carriers for all
types of content, whether voice, video or data — for the more than 500
million people in the European Union.


Whether they can deliver such a far-reaching commitment before the current
European legislative period ends next June is an open question, but the
push to legally cement net neutrality raises other issues.

Mobile operators, whose wireless grids are increasingly the go-to means for
access to the Internet, are not the only companies that restrict people
around the world from following their bliss on the Internet.

Consider the makers of the three major mobile telephone operating systems:
Apple with iOS, Google with Android and Microsoft with Windows. These
software systems are mostly incompatible with each other. Apps for one
typically won’t work on the other.

Then there’s Skype, the world’s largest Internet-based voice and video
service. Now owned by Microsoft, Skype is not like the calling system
connected to your telephone. You can’t call a Skype user from a rival Web
calling service. The closed-door approach is by design. In each case,
companies want to ensure that they reap the commercial benefits of their
technology.

According to the European Commission, mobile operators in Europe continue
to block services like Skype to about a third of consumers because it
cannibalizes their own sales. Ms. Kroes, a Dutch economist, has said that
she wants to ensure that a neutrality law would prevent just this sort of
self-serving filtering by operators.

But like beauty, net neutrality is in the eye of the beholder, say critics
including Luigi Gambardella, chairman of the European Telecommunications
Network Operators’ Association in Brussels. Operators oppose the push for a
tougher net neutrality law, he said, but if such a regulation must exist,
it should also be enforced on Web businesses like Microsoft, Google and
Apple whose smartphones and tablets increasingly let people avoid their
operator’s calling, texting and data charges.

Unlike phone service providers, which are prevented under E.U. law from
filtering Internet data except for purposes of network management, the
makers of mobile device operating systems are allowed to effectively steer
Internet traffic by giving priority to their own Web sites, applications
and online businesses.

The bifurcated approach, Mr. Gambardella said, has created a double
standard that is hurting operators while allowing Web-based competitors to
grab revenue, be it text-messaging sales via the texting app What’s App, or
revenue from calls with Skype or Viber, a Web-based mobile calling app
created by a company in Cyprus.

“All we are asking for is a level playing field,” Mr. Gambardella, who is
also a vice president at Telecom Italia, said. “The same rules should apply
to everyone.”

When Ms. Kroes was Europe’s competition commissioner from 2004 to 2009, she
took a similar approach, prosecuting Microsoft for building its Internet
Explorer browser directly into its dominant Windows operating system to
promote its own Web access tool over those of rivals.

Roslyn Layton, an analyst at Strand Consult, a telecommunications research
firm in Copenhagen, said the legislative debate in Europe over net
neutrality had been focused on operators and had neglected what she
described as the widespread bundling and discrete filtering done by Google,
Apple and Microsoft through their mobile operating systems.

Those companies keep to themselves key bits of information on a user’s
behavior, like a history of the geographic location of a mobile phone, that
ensures that outside application developers will not be able to produce a
better version of Gmail, YouTube, iTunes or Windows Live Mail, Ms. Layton
said.

When people choose an operating system, a chain reaction of decisions is
set in motion without their consent, she said, affecting how and where apps
appear on a phone or other mobile device, and from which company they can
buy more apps.

Imagine a mobile operator or Internet service provider trying to exert a
similar level of control. The operator could insist on preapproving Web
sites and applications. If a consumer changed mobile carriers, the apps
that had been bought would become worthless.

The behavior of a mobile operator or Internet service provider is of little
consequence when compared with the power of the device bundled with an
operating system, Ms. Layton said.

“If net neutrality supporters really cared about discrimination, they
should look at the entire Internet value chain,” she added.

Ryan Heath, a spokesman for Ms. Kroes, said that the commissioner agreed
that Web-based rivals to European telecom operators sometimes received
easier regulatory treatment, and that the issue was rising on the
commission’s regulatory agenda. But it is not an issue that she was likely
to tackle this year as part of her net neutrality recommendation.

“It’s a bit far-fetched to say the existence of an app store is breaching
net neutrality,” Mr. Heath said. “It can’t be assumed that every problem is
a competition or net neutrality problem.”

It is also unlikely, Mr. Gambardella said, that Ms. Kroes would choose to
anger companies in Silicon Valley by challenging the discretionary powers
of those who build the world’s biggest operating systems. But then again, a
few months ago, no one expected her to take on European operators either.

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