There’s no net neutrality problem requiring regulatory intervention, Europe’s cable...

access to certain traffic, there’s no issue as far as the cable industry is concerned, Cable Europe said in draft comments. Cable operators have nothing to gain from keeping customers from content and anyone who claims such activities occur has the burden of proving it, it said. If the issue is about traffic management, that’s also a non-starter, Cable Europe said. “Traffic management is a good and necessary tool,” and content and service providers must be left free to negotiate contracts, it said. “Fruitful and non-emotive debate” should take account of the necessity for reasonable traffic management, it said. Anyone in the Internet value chain should be able to create new business models, but there must be a clear distinction between the upstream market -- the relationship between Web companies/network access seekers and network operators -- and the downstream market, which concerns the relationship between Internet access providers and end users, it said. The former must be allowed to develop within the limits of competition law, while the latter may need traffic management transparency standards and quality-of-service definitions within the scope of the revised EU telecom rules, it said. A “truly neutral” network would subject users to a “bandwidth lottery” at peak time, it said. Moreover, setting rigid QoS requirements runs the risk of creating a far too static framework for the Internet, because QoS definitions can be easily outdated by new technologies and hamper innovation, it said. Nor should minimum QoS conditions be used as a door to impose other requirements on operators, it said. The GSM Association also rejected the idea that a net neutrality problem exists. Europe’s mobile markets are very competitive, and preemptive regulation restricting traffic management and service differentiation would undermine the digital economy by excluding new business models, locking in today’s technologies and stifling innovation, the GSMA said. Mobile operators need traffic management for content caching, content control and filtering, such as keeping minors from adult sites, active monitoring of network performance and capacity planning and spectrum, it said. GSMA members are “actively investigating” solutions to QoS issues, it said.