[Misc][R:X-Post][Goal?] New EU Net Neutrality law is too weak and needs fixing - call your representatives! (also, USA: CISA moves forwards, act!) What to do: Call and e-mail your representatives, share and etc.: https://savetheinternet.eu Deadline - Tuesday, October 27! Summary: The European Union was going to have one of the strongest net neutrality rules in the world, but it all went down the drain when in the late June they caved to ISPs and reached "a compromise", that is in reality a weak mish-mash of rules that allow for discrimination of the traffic and fast lanes and way less stronger that the ones adopted by USA. List of problem includes: 1) Fast lanes (hiding under the name of "specialized services"); 2) Zero-rating (not banned discriminatory practice); 3) Discrimination of the traffic by its type (class-based discrimination for "optimizing" networks - innovation killer) EDIT4: - online video games will suffer from it (see "More information"). There is also a possible discrimination against encrypted traffic. 4) Rules that allow to prevent "impending" congestions - basically, slow down the traffic whenever ISP want. But there are amendments to the EU net neutrality law available that can fix mentioned problems with it, and there is a campaign to call (preferable!), e-mail and message EU Parliament representatives to adopt those amendments on October 27 - https://savetheinternet.eu More information: A really good article that probably will answer all of your questions: article, (archive). EDIT3: Video games related quotes: For example, many ISPs in the UK limit the bandwidth available to peer-to-peer file sharing applications during times of congestion, arguing that these applications are not sensitive to delay. This creates huge problems for online gaming. ISPs use deep packet inspection technology to identify these applications, but the technology doesn’t work very well: it has a hard time distinguishing between online gaming and peer-to-peer file sharing, so online games stop working or don’t work as well as they could. If an online gaming provider wants to introduce a new feature for its game in the UK, it needs to work with the ISPs and their technology vendors to make sure that the feature won’t be caught up in the traffic management measures directed at peer-to-peer file sharing. This is the opposite of innovation without permission. Just quotes: Unless it adopts amendments, the European Parliament’s net neutrality vote next Tuesday threatens the open Internet in Europe. ... If a majority of the members who vote approves this flawed compromise next Tuesday, the rules are adopted and become law. Europe will have far weaker network neutrality rules than the US, and the European Internet would become less free and less open. By contrast, if a majority of the members approves amendments, the text goes back to the Council. The Council can then accept the amendments, and they become law. If the Council rejects the amendments, a joint committee consisting of representatives of the Parliament and the Council has six weeks to come up with a compromise. Any compromise would then have to be adopted by the Parliament and the Council. The future of the Internet in Europe is on the line. It’s up to all of us to save it. Nice write-up is on the site itself, including a small video. Also an old one, more text-heavy version of the site is available (note - it mentions October 28th instead of October 27th in the text - most likely a typo). What EDRi thinks about it: The final countdown for net neutrality in the EU, (archive) The Parliament now has the power to finish what it started last year. We urge the Parliament to adopt amendments to outlaw all forms of online discrimination Unclear “net neutrality” proposal returns to European Parliament – civil society groups call for action, (archive) EDIT5: And now, news coverage: Europe’s ‘net neutrality’ could allow torrent and VPN throttling (TorrentFreak), (archive). EU net neutrality up for a vote next week: Here’s how to fix the proposal (Ars Technica) (archive) Also, here is an archive of one neat thread in a different subreddit where they have collected some new and old articles about the problem. The Fight for the Future (archive), and Pirate Parties International (archive) both tweeted about it. Also Reddit_Tech_New tweeted about it (archive), but I don't know if it's an official account or what. And Americans: CISA moves further in the Senate, 84 to 14 vote - act now! EDIT: I should point out that it moves really fast and odds are not in our favour - people basically have to act to prevent it. Article (Techdirt), (archive). Yes, one bad amendment has been pulled from consideration (Techdirt) (archive), but that doesn't make this bill tolerable or mean that it won't return! Fight for the Future is already starting protests (archive), call now: http://www.decidethefuture.org https://stopcyberspying.com EDIT2: https://act.eff.org/action/tell-the-senate-vote-no-on-the-cybersecurity-information-sharing-act Here is a nice article about the recent resistance of the companies to CISA (Computerworld), (archive) (this part duplicated the text I copied into the previous CISA post, but I still have decided to leave it here) P.S. Relevance to GamerGate of this post is justified because it affects a huge part of #GG participants in Europe and allows them to have their Internet not being screwed over by corporations - which is something, I believe, we all can get behind. And the CISA bit at the end concerns rights of an other huge part of #GG to privacy and anonymity. Also, discrimination by the traffic type is a serious issue for video games, refer to the "Video games related quotes" in "More information".