Well for one, torrent's not a video format. Let alone a streaming video service.
And anyhow, FCC did exactly that; they went after Comcast for throttling torrents for no reason. And throttling torrents just because they're torrents is clearly not permissable by this clause by BEREC either; all it allows for is temporary and exceptional traffic shaping in case of congestion, provided it's done nondiscriminatorily. Which is a good thing; an ISP needs to have a neutral course of action available then besides a meltdown of its net. And yeah, I'd say latency insensitive bulk downloads would be perfectly sensible to deprioritize then. Now, doing what's reserved for recovery in general instead is certainly an abuse of network neutrality, by this rulebook as by FCCs.
It's not the same category, but it IS a competing service playing on an unfair playing field.
Leveling the playing field for people playing the same game is all fine and dandy, but it completely fucks over disruptive innovations challenging the status quo in a different category.
How about this one, people watch less TV than they did ten years ago, a lot of that time is now spent using Facebook, what happens when Facebook isn't throttled but Netflix and the rest in their category are?
> It's not the same category, but it IS a competing service playing on an unfair playing field.
It really isn't. Netflix isn't a protocol, and if you're using torrents as a drop in replacement for Netflix you're breaking copyright law in any case. You can't argue that you use torrents as a competing service without implying you're breaking the law.
That's kind of irrelevant. I was simply using torrents as an example.
The problem with the category thing is that it makes your passtime more important than my passtime. And suddenly the passtime that pays the most is going to get preferential treatment.
This hurts innovation and companies that want to disrupt current services with a different verticle.
Category based throttling sounds like a good idea but it simply is not neutral and will fail us.
copyright law is in fact harmonized on EU level, by the EU copyright directive. Not that it could be substantially different already by Berne convention on a global level.
However, choosing to throttle video content in general to promote their cable service would probably be allowed under this ruling. I don't know if that possibility is serious enough to worry about though.
I wonder even about that, given that it's stated that it can be done only under exceptional and temporary conditions of congestion. The regulator should probably act if it were the general practice instead.
But yeah, the public will need to stay vigilant over how national regulators implement this ruling case by case.
From my understanding it looks more like:
"We are streaming the Olympics and its transferring 2TB/s of data, we need to route this differently!". But then again, loopholes are loopholes, and it will be just a matter of time until it will be abused.
Sry, could you clarify, what looks more like rerouting a large download?? Anyhow, allowing traffic shaping in congestion control is not a network neutrality loophole in itself, but ofc any regulation depends on the regulator.
Both video. Both serve the end user in the same way.
But nobody will challenge it because nobody is in charge of torrents.
This kills neutrality completely. There is no way those ruling over this know where to draw the category lines properly.