Your freedom online is threatened by an EU proposal.

Why is not possible to have alternative internetworks?

On the one hand I think firms would just have to compete on offering as many services as possible. On the other hand I suppose if the offer is "10$ a month for free streaming of all Hollywood movies and free porn, and 10$ extra to get access to some opinions on the internet you might not agree with anyway", many people might opt for saving the 10$.

This site lets you choose and call your MEP by country: http://piphone.lqdn.fr/campaign/call2/NetNeutrality-final-ap...

This came up on reddit's /r/portugal and I had a look through their points to figure out what was going on. The legislation is here:

http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/newsroom/cf/dae/docu...

Their 5 points:

1) We don't want a two-tiered Internet, all data should be treated equally. Article 19 of the European Commission’s Telecoms Single Market proposal must be deleted.

It's a tough article to read but as far as I can tell it says the opposite. That any ISP can operate in any part of the EU.

2) Private companies cannot be judge, jury and police over online content. Article 23.5.a. of the European Commission’s Telecoms Single Market proposal must to be deleted.

23.5.a. just says that one of the few exceptions that allow filtering is "implement a legislative provision or a court order, or prevent or impede serious crimes". That last "or" may be poorly interpreted I suppose and I don't know who gets to say what's a "serious crime". Other than that it seems reasonable.

3) Europe won the Nobel peace prize – The European Commission’s credibility on human rights issues shouldn't be jeopardized by engaging in the same type of internet censorship that Europeans critique elsewhere in the world.

This isn't a demand of any sort, just a political point.

4) The current definition of "specialized service" (Article 2.15) increases costs and risk to internet users, and must be changed or deleted.

I can't really see the problem with this. Once you've set rules that you can't filter/degrade service, letting your users hire specialized services on top doesn't seem out of order. I suppose the risk is that if there isn't enough competition "proper access to Netflix" may become a "specialized" service.

5) Article 23, “Freedom to provide and avail of open internet access,” must replace "shall be free" with "have the right" to protect internet users from online discrimination.

This on I don't get. Maybe in legal-speak this makes a difference. I only went through the rest of this very lightly but it seemed to go in the right direction.

It's increasingly the case that internet, tv and telephone services are provided by a single company over a single set of infrastructure. Because those service providers have a vested interest to protect the commercial viability of their own offerings (specifically, the TV and telephone packages), there is an incentive to limit the internet service's viability as a replacement for TV and telephone services. Such limitations allow ISPs to engage in text-book antic-competitive behaviour by directly hindering their competitors, and, arguably, the "specialised services" language would allow them to do just that by treating competitors as a specialised service, and differentiating the service conditions (e.g. by throttling the bandwidth offered).

Additionally, using the specialised service language, services like, say, Youtube, Facebook, Netflix or iTunes can pay ISPs to be treated as a a specialised service, offering a better-than-standard experience (lifted traffic limits, increased bandwidth). Such a treatment is sure to be pretty damn expensive, and raises a very tall hurdle that new entrants in those markets must jump if they want to compete with the incumbents on even ground. This is, once again, highly anti-competitive.