BEREC Updates Net Neutrality Guidelines; Consults on This and Other Issues

BEREC, the European regulators body, has issued a draft update to its net neutrality guidelines, adopted in 2016, that have been now been renamed as the BEREC Guidelines on the Implementation of the Open Internet Regulation.

BEREC is inviting stakeholders to submit contributions regarding the draft guidelines, and has also prepared a consultation document, which serves three purposes: information on the ongoing public consultation and the work done in BEREC; identifying and explaining the major clarifications in the guidelines; and additional questions regarding the issue of monitoring of specific content. Among the changes in the guidance are best practice on open zero-rating programmes that are less likely to restrict end-user choice or undermine innovation on the internet; and ISPs may implement data compression techniques as long as they are lossless, i.e. the content originally sent reaches its destination unmodified.

Further, blocking of traffic is prohibited if it is executed within the network by the ISP, but such filtering is allowed if it is done outside of the network. And overall internet quality will evolve positively leading to a situation where a specialised service might no longer be necessary and national regulators have to reassess over time whether specialised service criteria are still met.

The questions on content concern paragraphs 69 and 70, on traffic management, in the guidance and BEREC is asking about traffic categorisation methods and billing, as the guidelines may not be sufficient for identification. BEREC has also issued consultations on geographical surveys of network deployments; a feasibility study on development of coverage information for 5G deployments; guidelines on quality of service parameters; and a common approach to identifying network termination points in different network topologies. Read more