The EU’s new internet rules will hurt the continent’s startups

http://www.economist.com/news/business/21677175-eus-new-internet-rules-will-hurt-continents-startups-multi-speed-europe

by jeo1234 • 11 years ago

115 36 11 years ago

TeMPOraL3• 11 years ago

I don't understand such articles, maybe someone can clarify the issue for me? If a company can do Harmful Things X and Y, and then a law appears that bans it from doing X but for some reason does not cover Y, then how is the rule hurting the victims of that company? How can reducing but not completely eliminating harmful things actually be actively hurting?

corv• 11 years ago

The European Parliament has partially eroded net neutrality with its decision on the 27th October due to loopholes.

kuschku3• 11 years ago

No. The Parliament had written a version without loopholes.

The Council then modified it, and said "If you don’t add these loopholes, we’ll veto it and all future variants of it".

As the council is representatives of the governments of the nations, complain to your government, not to the EU.

jfaucett2• 11 years ago

Its all about loopholes actually. Lets take for example a simple law that says all employers must give their employees health insurance. No sane person is against people having health insurance, its just the ways companies might get around this law that is the problem. For instance, lets say this applies to fulltime employees, well then the company might lay people off, hire more contractors and part-timers, then those same people have less job security, perhaps lower wages because other laws regarding fulltime employees dont apply, and still no health insurance.

That is essentially what this EU law boils down to: a law with lots of loophole room for companies to exploit.

logicchains2• 11 years ago

Lets take for example a simple law that says all employers must give their employees health insurance. No sane person is against people having health insurance

Given that in many countries apart from the US, health insurance is provided by the government and/or private sector, I'd posit that there are quite a few sane people who don't believe having employers be responsible for providing health insurance is necessarily a good idea.

An example found by some quick Googling: http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2012/05/12/how-emp...

Natanael_L• 11 years ago

In less words; side-effects of modified incentives.

If adding or removing one incentive or disincentive makes some completely different option more profitable than the intended one, that's a loophole that's likely to be abused.

seivan• 11 years ago

You wanted Net Neutrality. They gave you "Net Neutrality". You're now satisfied.

I wish more people would up-vote this, the article isn't getting the attention it should :-/ or I'm just overly worried.

skimpycompiler2• 11 years ago

That's why any startup that wants business will make an Inc in the US.

It's legally much simpler to do so, and leave your offices in the cheap EU. US Inc can employ your offices and at the same time have no people working in the US.

US is saved by ruthless capitalism. When I see what politicians from my country voted on I'm realizing that journalists, political science majors, historians, spanish/english/lang language teachers, philosophers, artists and bunch of other social scientists know much about nothing - maybe it says something about our national universities, maybe about these science areas as a whole, who knows. But for some reason they think they are capable of having a career in politics, and it works.

simonjgreen• 11 years ago

"saved"?

germanier3• 11 years ago

If you operate an independent Office of a foreign company in Germany (what your suggestion boils down to) you have to abide by almost the same laws that would apply if you had been incorporated in Germany. I assume it's the same in most other countries. Only huge companies can get around this by operating in many different countries and actually having employees in each of those.

skimpycompiler2• 11 years ago

You don't have to. You have an office in Germany, you work for the office in the US. Both companies are entirely unrelated, only thing that bonds them is a contract for doing the work. You are outsourcing the stuff from US company to yourself in Germany.

What US company is selling, or doing, isn't something EU would control.

junto• 11 years ago

  That's why any startup that wants business will make an Inc in the US.
  
  It's legally much simpler to do so, and leave your offices in the cheap 
  EU. US Inc can employ your offices and at the same time have no people 
  working in the US.

  US is saved by ruthless capitalism. When I see what politicians from my 
  country voted on I'm realizing that journalists, political science 
  majors, historians, spanish/english/lang language teachers, 
  philosophers, artists and bunch of other social scientists know much 
  about nothing - maybe it says something about our national universities, 
  maybe about these science areas as a whole, who knows. But for some 
  reason they think they are capable of having a career in politics, and 
  it works.

Eh? Did you read the article?

It states that the US has more stringent and complete controls on net neutrality than the EU. The EU has loopholes, therefore less controlling and protectionist (consumer) than the US.

If you want to take corporate advantage of lax net neutrality protection laws, then you are better off utilising "ruthless capitalism" in the EU (for this particular instance), and not in the US.

You argument is backwards.

spacecowboy_lon• 11 years ago

And each EU country implements the directives as it sees fit and can vary widely compare how TUPE is handled for example.

So you can expect some EU countries to play favorites with there ex PTO or Powerful Media interests.

miguelrochefort• 11 years ago

I've been saying that Net Neutrality was a bad idea from day 1. Nobody would listen.

There you go.

Regulation is always a bad thing.

TorKlingberg• 11 years ago

Did you read the article?

s73v3r• 11 years ago

"Regulation is always a bad thing."

I know, right? I long for the days in which companies could dump whatever sludge they wanted in the water, and where meatpackers could let the rats roam free over the half rotted meat they were going to grind into sausage.

KaiserPro• 11 years ago

The main problem with this argument is that "net neutrality" is a poorly defined term.

What it has come to symbolise in the states is the lack competition, and the ability of At&t verizon and timewarner to stifle competition.

For example: the netflix fiasco.

Comcast wanted money for peering directly with netflix.

In the UK and most of Europe that sort of dick waving is very very difficult to achieve.

Firstly because there is competition in the UK, holland, france etc., there is more than one provider of broadband in most areas (and very very tight rules about what the monopoly can charge.)

That means that if netflix is slow because a certain company is playing hardball, customers will leave. So deliberately slowing down a key legal service is going to loose you customers. Doing so in an effort to boost your own rival will also lead to successful prosecution (unlike in the states)

Secondly here in europe, peering is cheap and easy. Places like LINX, LONAP and the european equivalents means that peering centres are co-owned by all the people peering. Not a Big ISP. There are still peering agreements where money is changed hands.

Thirdly ISPs here are more than happy to have Edge caches. why? because it cuts down on the need for peak bandwidth to non local traffic. It also cuts down on bandwidth going other third-party connections(which again cost money).

Crucially, Not all traffic is treated the same. For the last 10 years QoS has been applied to virtually all domestic connections. You literally cannot have cheap broadband, with full connectivity and no traffic shaping and it be usable. To make sure that your domestic internet is usable the ISP would have to provision your full link speed in the backhaul, to all upstream networks.

ISPs may say that they don't traffic manage, but they are 100% telling porkies. In the UK, all ISPs have a fair use policy. This states that certain types of traffic will be slowed during peak hours, or that if you use too much bandwidth your whole connection will be slowed.

Traffic management is universal.

s3nnyy• 11 years ago

Yet another reason why I live in Switzerland, which is NOT in the EU. Read my story here: "Eight reasons why I moved to Switzerland (to work in IT)": https://medium.com/@iwaninzurich/eight-reasons-why-i-moved-t... If you are interested in coming to Switzerland, just shoot me a mail.

dsthode• 11 years ago

Completely unrelated to the topic, but did anyone notice that the article is from the future? Has Oct. 31st as publication date.

nraynaud• 11 years ago

a UK conservative magasine against an EU action, so surprising. To them, even if EU cured cancer it would still be wrong. Why do we see so many links of this website here actually? Like most UK people they hate the EU, and they are only part of it for subversion.

signaler• 11 years ago

'Internet' and 'rules' in the same sentence is a contradiction in terms. The web was not designed for the kind of draconian oversight you see in the EU and elsewhere. Anything that resembles some form of rigidity will be made less rigid and force startups to 'think differently' and more fluid. It's a form of present shock (as Rushkoff has coined) which people are not used to that you see in bustling Shoreditch and other tech melting pots. You actually have people who look like The Internet in those places with USB flash drives as necklaces...

tigerente• 11 years ago

With "special services" insufficiently defined, this opens up a lot of possibilities. Just today, Deutsche Telekom announced that "According to our [Deutsche Telekom] ideas, they [startups] pay for it as part of a revenue sharing of a few percent. That would be a fair contribution for the use of infrastructure."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10472765

With "video conferencing, online gaming, telemedicine automated traffic control and self-steering cars up to integrated production processes in the industry" as examples of users needing to pay, this goes a lot further than what has always been argued for by the commission.

The EU’s new internet rules will hurt the continent’s startups

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