[Fnoord]

Bandwidth isn't unlimited.

Without net neutrality companies like Elsevier/Google/Facebook could pay a company like Bahnhof for a special treatment. Such as priority traffic for discounts. We -in Europe- decided we really don't wanna go down that road. This law, however...

It is necessary though because before you know it traffic such as Tor or SSH or OpenVPN or whatever is considered misc gets lower priority.

[buboard]

> We -in Europe- decided we really don't wanna go down that road.

Europe does not have net neutrality in mobile. Zero-rating is a way to subsidize specific services with "video pass", "social pass", "chat pass" etc, which are uber popular throughout europe

[hgiasd39]

>Without net neutrality companies like Elsevier/Google/Facebook could pay a company like Bahnhof for a special treatment.

And customers could just use another ISP in that case. Net neutrality is only an issue when you have government enforced monopolies for ISPs like in the US.

[Fnoord]

Yeah, that sounds really fluffy and sweet until you realise there's a huge barrier for entry: you won't easily have ROI since you need to invest in infrastructure. Heck, you won't even have the wireless 4G licenses. There's only so many.

There are 4 major mobile telcos in The Netherlands. #3 wants to merge with #4 (Tele2) so we may end up with a triopoly [1], and #3 may then use the cheap LTE/4G license which #4 got for a cheap price.

For wired, if you're lucky you can pick fiber. Otherwise you're stuck with cable or DSL from the duopolists [2], if they even both provide decent network at your location, that is. All the others are merely resellers who don't own the actual network(s).

It isn't much different in the rest of Europe. What is different is that there's more opponents of net neutrality, and obviously a duopoly is better than a monopoly, and a triopoly is better than a duopoly or monopoly. However it is far from an ideal situation; it isn't a healthy market. Who'd have thought if you sold entire infrastructures to companies (the cable infrastructure were owned by the local governments before, and the telephone network by the government as well) or if you sell a limited amount of licenses.

[1] KPN, Ziggo (VodafoneZiggo joint venture), T-Mobile.

[2] KPN, Vodafone (VodafoneZiggo joint venture).