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Herald: “On the internet you decide what you do, right?”
This is a question that I found on your website RespectMyNet.eu.
And well, I don’t know what you think, it sounds quite plausible.
But the answer that they give is: “Maybe not!” So, who that is,
who actually decides what you do on the internet and
what consequences that has, and what you can do against that –
these two men will tell you now. They are Thomas Lohninger
who fought against data retention in Austria – and successfully –
and he has been very active in that politics ever since.
He is here with Christopher Talib, Campaign Manager for LaQuadratureDeNet,
the French NGO fighting for civil rights. Welcome!
Together they say: Make the Internet neutral again!
Please give them a warm applause!
*applause*
Thomas Lohninger: Thanks, everyone! Is the microphone working? Yeah, great.
So, first I have to say something for that title,
if the slides could come up?…
Okay, we don’t have slides so far. Christopher Talib: Yes we do!
Lohninger: So. “Make the internet neutral again”. When we decided to have this title
for our talk this was of course before Donald Trump became elected.
Most of our talk will be about how to enforce net neutrality, how to really
keep the internet free and open. But of course we also have to talk about
what will happen in the US. We both worked on the savetheinternet.eu campaign.
This common effort of various NGOs around Europe started three years ago
when the Commission proposed a very disastrous law on net neutrality
that would basically abandon the principle. And we followed this law
throughout the legislative process on all stages, and then even through,
with the regulatory implementation. And this…
you can all see on savetheinternet.eu there’s now an archive page. Because…
let’s talk a little bit more about this campaign. What is unique here is
that we really open-sourced every line of code that we wrote for this campaign.
Including the tools that we used for contacting your representatives,
the Members of the European Parliament as well as the regulatory agencies.
And here you see the traffic graph because we also have visitor statistics from Piwik
throughout these three years. And there you can see that we had huge success
from various players around Europe. From the Netherlands, from… a huge
shoutout to the Reddit community, they were awesome! And also change.org,
netzpolitik.org, and Alexander Lehmann helped us a lot.
As well as Firefox which ran a snippet for savetheinternet in the last parts
of the campaign. And in the final stages of this fight for net neutrality in Europe
we really brought the protests to the streets. There were demonstrations
in Barcelona, Riga, Bonn, Brussels and Vienna. And this was really
a group effort. At the end this coalition grew more and more, and we had 23 NGOs
from 14 countries that joined us in this. And, ultimatively, we
achieved almost half a million submissions to BEREC, the “Body of European Regulators
for Electronic Communications”. And this is really a historic number. Because
all previous consultations of the regulators in Europe had a maximum of around
100 comments. So, no, in all that process they had so much public interest
and engagement. And this really changed the landscape within the regulators
because suddenly they were observed by the public, and before that they were basically
hiding behind some processes, and not really having to engage with
their own constituency. If you look at the submissions by country you can see
that Germany has the largest share. This is of course because the debate
here in Germany is a little bit more nuanced and widespread
than in other countries. But still we also had the UK and France, and Spain and Italy
that contributed a lot through this campaign. But I also, being an Austrian,
want to point out that a few small countries disproportionately contributed
with submissions. Austria, Sweden, Denmark and Belgium really kicked ass, and that’s
probably because they had very good NGOs that, although most of them only run
with volunteers could really mobilize in their local language to get the word out,
and get people engaged for net neutrality. So. We now have this law.
And we also have the regulatory implementation. So what does it
actually say? What type of net neutrality do we have now in Europe
for half a Billion people? It is no longer possible to just
block or censor content based on commercial reasons. So you can
no longer prohibit users the use of VOIP, or messaging, or file sharing
in the Terms of Services. There can still be blocking for legal reasons. If you have
a law, if you have a Court order. But an ISP can not arbitrarily start blocking
parts of the internet. This is clearly prohibited. We have a new right.
We have a ‘device freedom’ now. That means that you can connect any type of device
to your internet connection. And your ISP can no longer charge you e.g. for using
your phones internet on your laptop, tethering. That’s really cleared (?) and
absolutely clear. Also on “specialized services”, I’m particularly happy
that we reached this result because this was maybe 60% of the whole debate
in the European Parliament and throughout the legislative process: what should we do
with “specialized services”? And originally, they were intended to be
the loophole for net neutrality, to circumvent the whole net neutrality
by just making some service a specialized service. But now we really
limited this danger to something that is handleable, and now a specialized service
can only be something which could technically not work over the open internet.
And you can see this clear here, I mean, that’s a picture from the video
that Facebook shows you when you have your birthday. And I found this so telling,
because this power plug with a Facebook sign is exactly what a specialized service
in the bad reading would be. It is no longer a universal connection
that allows you to use every device with this network. Instead, it’s just
for one service. And if we go down that road we lose the universal character
of the internet which allows us to do everything with it. Every invention,
every idea on equal footing. With this model it is one Facebook plug,
one Google plug and so forth. Another important issue that is still ongoing,
and not as clear as the previous ones is Zero-Rating. Zero-Rating is the practice
of exempting certain services from your data cap. So you have your 2 GB
but Whatsapp does not count towards those 2 GB. The new rules say
this has to be handled on a case-by-case basis. So it’s quite dubious to see
how this will play out. We have a few rulings now, from Austria, Sweden
and one from Hungary. But this is really an ongoing process.
What is clear is that you can not technically discriminate stuff with Zero-Rating.
So you cannot, say, after you used up your data cap and the rest of the internet
is blocked, you can still use the zero-rated application. This is clearly prohibited.
But about the Zero-Rating itself – it’s an ongoing process.
Traffic Management – the last issue – is the day-by-day operations of a network.
So what do you do when you have a congestion, when there is too much traffic
and the pipe is not big enough, how do you handle these? And we have a principle
that says Traffic Management has to be application-agnostic, so everything
has to be treated the same, but you can have exceptions,
for class-based traffic management, based on Quality-of-Service characteristics.
But the burden of proof here lies with the ISPs. If the ISP wants to manage
their traffic they have to really have a justification why this is necessary
and in line with the new law. And we will closely monitor how ISPs
make this transparent and how NRAs will handle this. We’re not really happy
about the result on this one, but it’s still a workable text.
And now I’m gonna hand over to my colleague.
Christopher: Thank you Thomas. You hear me well? Okay.
Basically, RespectMyNet is a grassroot tool we use for campaigning
for net neutrality. It was built to try to see what kind of infraction
and violation you could see on net neutrality. It’s an old tool, it has already
a few years. We rebooted it for the last campaign for the BEREC
that Thomas told you about. And, basically, what it does… what we will use it now
is to try to see how ISPs and operators are going to implement net neutrality
regulation in Europe. So, you know what we have it’s a law, we have,
as Thomas could say, different concepts that allows good things and also
bad things. However, the question is that, to know how those things are going to be
implemented. So what it is now: We’d like to crowdsource the search
for net neutrality violation. Basically, this tool allows you to input
and to see if there are net neutrality violations, or in your country,
or by your operator.
It could have crowdsourced documents of all types of net neutrality violation
in Europe. And also it could be… we have a “Me, too!” button that allows you to say
if you experienced this as well. And so you don’t feel alone in front of your
internet connection, having problems and wondering if this is your connection,
or if this is a contract-based or general complication from the operator.
You could see that if other people already have it.
But crowdsourcing most of the net neutrality violations is not enough.
What we’ll do if all those violations, when you just say: “Ah, they’re doing
bad stuff, well.” As you say in French: “That makes a good leg.”
But yeah, that joke, that cannot be translated, really. *laughs*
Basically, we will be using that to fix those violations. And to arouse people
to actually see… that’s… pinpointing and to notice all types of violations
that allows you to fix them. When the BEREC will review the regulation
on net neutrality, and he will do that, periodically. We can go and arrive
with huge documents, saying, there are problems here.. here.. here and there.
So, I’m already skipping in front, of my clicking ‘Next Slide’. And it’s a huge
documentation, and in our activist world of internet where everything is very,
very quick, and we are very quick on new information, it's hugely important
to have good documentation and to remember what happened before, and
so it does not happen again. Especially on net neutrality, as this campaign has been
ongoing for several years now. The second thing that’s interesting
for that type of tools is to allow telecom regulators to be accountable. So e.g.
French National Regulation Agency really likes this tool because they can see
what private companies are doing more or less behind their back. To give an example:
Belgium Telecom operators, e.g. Belgacom or Proximus waited for the publication
of the net neutrality regulation. And when they saw that Zero-Rating was more-or-less
accepted but only will be blocked on a case-by-case decision
they published and they issued a lot of new contracts on subscription with Zero-Rating.
So e.g. you have that one also in Germany, if I recall well, that you can use
your data caps on your mobile device until a certain amount. But when you
reach that amount everything is down-speed except Whatsapp. And that’s seen
as a net neutrality violation. And that’s a really good example of
what Zero-Rating is. And that actually should be illegal. And that’s why we have
RespectMyNet. It’s fairly easy to use and very low cost of time because when you see
what issues you have on your computer and you can check it out if you have
a violation. Usually you can see that already in your contract. And that’s why
we created a fairly easy form.
As you could understand this is a very complicated issue and that involves
a lot of different elements, especially when there are elements from law,
there are elements from telecom regulation… But we try to make it as simple as possible.
And so you can see the different points on country, type of operator, the contract
you have, is it a fixed or mobile line you have, and also the type of discrimination
you can see. Here you have just Zero-Rating because that would be the biggest type
of discrimination we will experience in the next years. However, you still have
throttling, class-based, contract-based etc.
When you input that kind of discrimination on RespectMyNet.eu,
behind the scene on the backstage we have a team that will review cases, and to see
if there is enough information to use that as a good case. E.g. if you just tell us:
“My internet is slow”, that is not enough. That’s why we try to make enough questions,
enough place for you to describe, to give as much information as you could
to develop that. And that have to return on the web page. And after that
we gathered all that information which is no personal identification information,
that were just identification on the type of cases. RespectMyNet.eu is a tool that
has been ongoing development because we’re trying to use it for something
that it has not been programmed for. And now we’re using it (?) to be fixed. E.g.
to have a fixed type of sign flag,
let’s say, on that it is searching a violation. We are going to develop
linguistic admin groups because e.g. I don’t speak German, and when you have
an input from a German speaking it’s difficult to understand what it is.
Especially when it’s linked to the contract. And we’re trying to develop visualization
of cases, so if you are a graphic designer or data visualizator, Affissionador (?) you’re
welcome to help us. Basically, RespectMyNet, as everything most of us do
it’s free like in Free Speech and like in free beer. It’s easy to use,
it’s crowd-sourced database. So if you like databases come play with us
and really get involved with that because there is a tremendous amount of work
on a subject that does not involve terrorism which lately very scares.
We have everything of the information on our Git lab. You have the address here
at git.laquadrature.net. You’ll have, anyway, that on the front page
and you have information on our wiki, it’s wiki.laquadrature.net. Now, we’ll
speak now on the future thing, and I’ll let… this thing.. to Thomas.
Thomas: Thank you Chris. So, how can we use this tool? How can we use RespectMyNet
because we now enter a stage on net neutrality as well as with
the new general data protection regulation in Europe where we have quite good laws
but now we have to deliver them to the people. Because it’s now of much value
if you have privacy in principle but your data actually is in the hands of someone else.
And the same with net neutrality: it doesn’t matter if you are not allowed
to block services when, in fact, your internet is restricted by your ISP.
And what we will do, particularly as epicenter.works is our organization
we have the high priority to really work on delivering net neutrality to the people.
There is this concept of strategic litigation which is well in place in the U.S.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) as well as the Electronic Frontier Foundation
pick their cases really litigate for fundamental rights in a strategic way.
And we want to apply these concepts now to net neutrality. And we’ve already done that
in one case. We looked at the violation of an Austrian mobile operator, 3/Hutchinson
and dated exactly this type of Zero-Rating that I explained earlier as clearly prohibited
where you have this one graph [curve], which is the violet one, which is
the public broadcaster in Austria, and when you reach the data cap,
the 2130 seconds, it goes down to a flat line. But free mobile TV service,
their in-house television service, continues to run without interference.
So that’s a classical technical discrimination between applications
which is clearly prohibited. We submitted a case, it was successful, they cancelled
this type of violation for all new contracts and they changed the landscape
of all their contracts. Because they could no longer give their own services
a competitive advantage, they quadrupled up to 17 times the amount
of volume that you can buy with this operator. And this is not a singular phenomenon.
We have similar cases in the Netherlands as well as with Slovenia. Once an ISP
is no longer allowed to give preferential treatment to their own service
they start giving more volume to all their subscribers which is, of course,
a really good thing. But, as I said, Zero-Rating is one of the biggest problems
that we have and if you want to put it in numbers: ca. 40% of all internet providers
in Europe currently zero-rate at least one application. So this is really
an endemic problem that you can find in almost every network and country,
and so we really have to do something about it. Because there are drastic scenarios
that are in front of us. Mark Suckerberg announced two times already that he wants
to bring his walled garden, called ‘Free Basic’, previously ‘internet.org’,
also to Europe. He recently also announced that he wants to bring Free Basic
to the U.S. and in the U.S. we have quite a hard time ahead.
Donald Trump is not really a fan of net neutrality, from the few comments that
we could analyze so far. And if you look at the three people that he appointed
to his Transition Team for the regulator, the FCC in the U.S., there is
a quite horrible outlook. Jeffrey Eisenach as well as Mark Jamison and Roslyn Layton
are hardcore telecom lobbyists. And you can really get a picture of what’s coming
in the U.S. if you look at the paper “Beyond net neutrality” from Mark Jamison
and Roslyn Layton from June of this year. What they propose here is to basically
replace all net neutrality rules with a multi stakeholder concept.
But they have a very unique interpretation of what ‘multi stakeholder’ means.
They only limit this multi stakeholder group to the 20 biggest industry players.
They explicitly say: “No civil society, no consumer protection, no scientists”.
So it’s basically the industry making their own rules. They also propose new barriers
for every type of ex-ante regulation of the FCC. So that’s basically
putting net neutrality in the bin in the U.S. which would also risk
their competitive advantage that the U.S. has right now as the power house
of all startup innovation. If this really comes through then only the startups
that partner up with existing monopolies have a chance to compete.
In Europe we also have a quite worrying proposal. Part of the legacy
of Guenther Oettinger. He proposed in September of this year a new regulation
for BEREC. Who here knows what BEREC is? Hands up!
Oh! Actually quite a few, that’s good. BEREC is the umbrella above the European
regulators for the internet. And it’s an agency that has done quite a good job
on various occasions. They are voice of reason, they have quite a good model
to really incorporate different views and what the Commission is proposing
with this new law is basically replacing this agency, making it into an independent
legal personality, and having that complete control on all levels from the Commission.
So in this law you can find the Commission writing itself into this independent agency
on many, many occasions. And the most obscure outcome of this is
the Executive Director as well as the quite powerful Board of Appeals
they will be chosen by regulators, but only from a list precompiled by the European
Commission. And that’s quite a communistic tradition of democracy.
And we have to follow this dossier closely. It is now entering
the legislative process in the EU and if this would go through as it was proposed
this would basically mean that the agencies in task of enforcing net neutrality
are under complete power grab of the European Commission which has proven,
times and times again, that it is mostly interested in industry policy
but not really in the citizen’s interest.
For all of that we need you to put the violations that you come across
in your daily internet experience into RespectMyNet.eu as well as write to
team@epicenter.works because we are also very interested in learning
about the violations that are out there. And about really finding partners
in various countries before we can submit cases to the regulators in that country
and really keep the internet free and open. You can put it like that:
with this new net neutrality law we now have a tool box to really keep
the internet open. And with RespectMyNet we have a crowd-sourced todo list
of all the violations that we have to get rid of. Thanks for your attention!
And as a last word: we were previously THIS organization, now we are THIS organization,
we changed our name. Thanks!
*applause*
Herald: I think we have time for a few more questions. So please step up
to the microphones if you have one and I’ll call your number.
Nobody so far, is there a question from the internet?
Also not. So you answered all open questions exhaustively. That is great.
Christopher: No, there’s a question there… Herald: There is a question?
Oh, up there! Well then, number 5. Please, go ahead!
Question: Hi, my question as an IT guy is:
do you think about automating the process to file these complaints?
So, I’m thinking about people who run out [of] their quota per month and,
say, can easily start an app which checks about 50 different services to see
which service is performing good, and which not, and automatically
do a complaint on your side? Something like that?
Christopher: If I understand well your question that if we are planning to automate
the system of inputting subscriptions… input in[to] RespectMyNet?
Question: Yeah!
Christopher: The thing is that that would only cover a certain type of violation.
It won’t e.g. – don’t think in what I understood – it won’t be able to cover
e.g. contract-based violations.
But that could be an idea, why not.
Thomas: Maybe, if you go to RespectMyNet.eu you’ll find a list of the measurement tools
that are out there right now. The software that you can use on your own computer
to test if your internet connection is open and neutral. But most of the software
is abandonware. Sadly, it has not been updated in quite a few years. And then
we need more developers to actively engage in those software tools. And I hope now
that more people will do that because the threat in the U.S. is quite real and
we need better software. Automated testing happens as part of some Bittorrent clients
e.g. which upload their data to Measurementlab. And there are
some programs like that but none really on a wide scale.
Herald: Okay. So, the next one is the person on microphone no. 3, please.
Question: Yes, I have a question regarding the regulation to reform BEREC.
Are you planning to fight this regulation, and if so, and if not, are there
any ways to fight it for the rest of us?
Thomas: Thanks for being eager! Yes, we are now… this is just the beginning
of this dossier. So it has been proposed September 14, 2016.
And now the Parliament and the Council are just slowly starting to work on it and
it’s part of a much bigger package of legislation called the Telecom Code.
And we are in ongoing conversations with the legislators and the various
political parties to see what is the best strategy. And if we think that there is
a reason to really have a campaign then we will have one. But right now it is
too early to say. Question: Thanks!
Herald: Okay, thank you very much! And the next person on microphone no.3!
Question: Thank you very much for an excellent talk. For Savetheinternet
there was a lot of national NGOs active. And with this proposed power grab of BEREC
how can we at a national level help support the telcom.. tel-regulators nationally
to save the net neutrality?
Thomas: The best thing to do right now would be to speak with your telecom
infrastructure ministry, whoever is responsible of this in the European Council
because they are the ones that are now forming their opinion. And I know from
quite a few countries where this is really an open situation, so they are welcoming
input from citizens. And they, of course, speak with the Members of the European
Parliament from your country. They are the ones ultimatively voting on this.
I’m not aware if we already have a Rapporteur on that but there will be one
soon, and… Christopher: On the Telecom package?
Thomas: Yeah! Christopher: Del Castillo.
Thomas: Del… Oh my god. *laughs* The worst Rapporteur that we could
possibly have. It’s the same that we had for the net neutrality law.
But speak with your local ministry and your Members of the European Parliament.
That’s the right answer for that. And I hope that also a few countries and
as well as the regulators will see this power grab as what it is. Because the
Commission is not really in the position to insert itself on all levels of government.
That’s just the wrong approach.
Herald: Okay, there’s time for one last question. Please, a short one! No.4.
Question: Thank you very much for the talk. I was wondering, do you think
it’s possible to actually convince telecom companies to be on our side, so to say,
and to get rid of all of those Zero-Rating things, and convince them that
net neutrality can be a good argument for customers. Or do you think the only way
is through litigations and going to courts?
Christopher: I think, both. The problem with telecom operators is
that you go against their business model. Zero-Rating can increase their sales,
they’re increasing their quinta (?) percentage etc. and net neutrality can not, or at least
not in the way they see it. There is two things: on one hand you have
customer protection, on the other hand you have private profits. So I think we’ll be
very welcoming any type of arguments, of advocacy that could link both, and saying
that we’re making a better world, but also we’re contributing to capitalism.
So, that’s a tricky one. But, you know, we can discuss it.
Thomas: But it’s doable. I mean there are a few ISPs that are fierce (?)
pro-net neutrality advocates. Because they’ve realized that net neutrality
is good for their business model. Because this open platform creates the demand
for the only product they really have, which is internet access.
About… it is really a question of their understanding of their own business model.
And for the most part, they would either cannibalize the revenues
of other companies that run on their network, instead of just being mere pipe.
But please try to convince them. We do as well.
Question: I will. Christopher: If you want to discuss more,
we’ll be around the tea house of LaQuadrature upstairs, so
you’re welcome there.
Herald: Thank you very much, Christopher and Thomas.
*applause*
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