Net Neutrality Coming to Germany?

Last week I participated in a meeting of the German Association of Telecommunications and Value-Added Service Providers (VATM), which got together to establish a net neutrality working group. The discussion pretty much reiterated the arguments that have been exchanged in the United States for quite some time now. So far this has not been a big topic in Germany or Europe outside of some expert and activist circles. To my knowledge, operators have pretty much ignored the net neutrality debate so far. And I am not entirely sure why that is — maybe because we are just lagging behind the US as in so many other cases, or because of a different attitude toward civil liberties. Either way, I certainly welcome a debate provided it involves all stakeholders: legislators, operators, civil rights activists and technology experts.

Right now the main concern of many operators seems to be how to charge content providers such as Google for data transport over their networks. This is understandable as most providers of over-the-top (OTT) services are located outside of German operators’ networks. However, I personally do not believe that this is ever going to happen — the charging for content delivery that is. And even if they had a chance to succeed, they would be too late anyway. Google already operates the third-largest network infrastructure — based on carried traffic — in the world, according to measurements by Arbor Networks. This goes along with a recent announcement by Google that they plan to roll out their own fiber optic broadband network serving up to 500,000 people during its trial. So even if ISPs succeeded in setting up a charging scheme for downstream traffic being sent to their networks by the content providers of the world (and don’t forget just how many of those are out there), for instance through some sort of clearinghouse regulation, the biggest of all, Google, will be mostly off the hook.

Coincidentally, the German parliament (”Deutscher Bundestag”) published an article on net neutrality which I personally really liked for its conciseness and neutrality (not to be mixed up with net neutrality!). It seems unlikely that the German government will introduce net neutrality legislation any time soon. And rightly so! If a government gets net neutrality legislation wrong, which can easily happen given the complicated technical nature of the beast, it may very easily stifle innovation instead of encouraging it. One simple example: If net neutrality legislation would be enacted prohibiting application-specific traffic management, it would simply mean the end of any quality-of-service (QoS) provisioning.

So instead of trying to inscribe a probably flawed understanding of net neutrality into law, the government should — and most likely will with sufficient lobbying from groups like VATM — ensure that competition is working well in the telecoms industry. Because in the end, competition trumps regulation — for the benefit of all Internet users.