[zimmen]

This might look nice but sadly this kind of reasoning by Dutch parlament isn't consistent at all!

- For some reason Google is allowed to act like "a postal worker who delivers a letter, looks to see what's in it, and then claims he hasn't read it."

- Judges can rule blocking of websites (like they did with the pirate bay).

- Mobile operator fees are unregulated an artificially kept way too high.

- We pay a regulatory fee for every empty CD, DVD or Tape we buy because we just might use it to put copyrighted stuff onto it.

There is no straight line of thinking when it comes to this kind of law.

[gglanzani]

Slightly OT Well, as an italian living in the Netherlands, allow me to disagree with 3 and have empathy about 4, since we have that in Italy as well.

As for 3, every time I go back to Italy I'm amazed at how much they pay for calling, sms-ing and navigating with their mobiles. Here with Vodafone NL I pay for 15€/month for 400min/sms + 1GB of data. My father in law pays 20€/month for 620min/sms + unlimited data.

In Italy you can forget anything similar to that. I agree that now prices are going up, but that is especially the case when you get a subsidized phone with your plan: there they'll charge you a steep premium. It's very sad but the introduction of smartphone whose price was above 400€ (iPhone, I'm looking at you, not the first but the most popular) allowed the providers to pumps the price saying: "Hey, here this 500€ phone, but let's sign a 1500€ two years contract". People began stupidly falling for these sort of things, and the result is that prices are soaring and people are outraged. In the meantime providers are happy. /OT

[dirkdk]

- what Google eavesdropping are you referring to? Them displaying advertisement next to your free email? Get a paid account - here in USA a simple plans starts with $60 dollars w 2Gb data, and service completely sucks. As a Dutch expat, my Vodafone connection is one of the few things I really miss here in Silicon Valley.

And yes it is old news as parliament already passed this law, still I am proud of my tiny home country

[tripzilch]

I agree about the other stuff but

> - Mobile operator fees are unregulated an artificially kept way too high.

What do you think OPTA does? There's been several cases in fact where operators (both mobile and otherwise, iirc) were caught price-fixing. It's a few years ago, but at least something is in place.

Maybe it doesn't work as well as it should though, is that what you meant? I'd be interested to hear.

[perfunctory]

What does it mean to be "artificially too high"?

[dchest]

Result of cartel?

[perfunctory]

cartels tend to fall apart eventually.

[joelhaasnoot]

There is a NMA (competition regulators) investigation going on into mobile operators, and there is proof that for pre paid services there was price fixing going on.

[hobin]

I'm not saying you're wrong here, but do you have a source for that? Though I had heard of the investigation, I didn't know any proof had been found.

[joelhaasnoot]

No hard proof maybe, but a senior official/whistleblower said he had proof. News was related to visits to mobile providers early december I believe.