Dutch politicians as a class are not know for their internet nous, but they exceeded expectations in a big way this week. Lately several big mobile phone companies (ex government monopoly KPN and of course Vodafone) have been whinging about their consumers not texting and phoning enough. Instead people have increasingly turned to things like WhatsApp or Skype to do it for free, over mobile internet. And sure, KPN and Vodafone earn money selling mobile internet subscriptions, but not enough. Which is why KPN announced a few weeks ago it would start to charge extra for access to certain kinds of internet services.
Which pissed people off big time, of which politicians took notice and last week the opposition parties drafted a proposal to introduce net neutrality, which would prohibit providers from filtering or charging for access to internet services the way Vodafone and KPN wanted to. If this proposal makes it into law, the Netherlands would be one of the first countries in the world to regulate internet access this way. Which is important, because it means your provider will no longer be able to decide what you can and cannot see on the internet.
Without net neutrality, we’d see mobile internet evolve cable access subscription schemes: you’d just get a small part of the internet with your standard subscription and would have to pay extra to see the more interesting stuff, without ever having the opportunity to see everything, a bit like on the illustration above. Kudos for our politicians for preventing this from happening.