There are “surprising new developments” in the latest global fiber deployment rankings, the Fiber-to-the-Home Council said at its Milan conference Thursday. Turkey made the list for the first time, and the United Arab Emirates popped up fourth in FTTH market penetration, ahead of all European and Americas economies, the council said. Russia is about to overtake the U.S. in fiber connection penetration, it said, but European deployment remains slow and patchy. European Commission Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes blamed regulators, saying their uneven enforcement of next-generation access rules is hampering investment.
Internet access and service providers are increasingly being coerced into “devolved enforcement” of laws and public policy goals, European Digital Rights said Wednesday in a report. A large number of national, regional and international initiatives seek to challenge the relationship between Internet intermediaries and their consumers in order to boost providers’ role in intellectual property rights enforcement, child safety, protection of tax revenue from online gambling and other objectives, it said. Technological and market developments since the last decade, when current intermediary liability laws such as the EU e-commerce directive’s “safe harbor” were created, have led to more legal uncertainty and better incentives for ISPs to become more involved in the data they transmit, to offer “non-neutral” Internet access, it said. Third parties such as governments and intellectual property owners now find it easier to encourage companies to police the Internet than to address the problems themselves, it said. Real self-regulation exists where service providers manage their networks to avoid spam, block attacks and viruses and comply with judicially ordered notice-and-takedown orders, but the growing move toward “cooperation” between ISPs and law enforcement bodies, non-judicial takedowns and voluntary Web-blocking and filtering amounts to devolved enforcement, EDRI said. Academic research shows the dangers of such an approach for openness and fundamental rights, but governments and regional organizations such as the EU appear to treat such delegations of law as “an unquestioned good,” it said. As a result, due process, free speech and the democratic nature of the Internet are now in grave danger, the report said. “Essentially every aspect of our online activity is subject to regulation by private companies” based on a range of public relations concerns, business priorities, threats of regulatory interventions and worries about civil and criminal liabilities, it said. Governments are voluntarily surrendering political and judicial power to an industry that’s changing rapidly, it said. This slope toward a “censorship ecosystem” is taking place with very little analysis about its long-term consequences and absent a clear democratic decision that this is genuinely in society’s best interest, it said. An urgent public debate is needed to assess the scale of the policing measures being entrusted to intermediaries and the cost to the rule of law, human rights, and effective investigation and prosecution of serious crimes in the digital environment, it said. EDRI Advocacy Coordinator and report author Joe McNamee said he will meet with EC officials and European Parliament members to “talk them through” the document. One European Commission vice president has already voiced shock at the lack of oversight, even within the EC, of the informal agreements with industry, McNamee told us.
EU governments agreed Monday to increase the rights of consumers who shop online and across borders, a change that the European Commission considers crucial to encouraging e-commerce. Internal market, industry and research ministers in the Competitiveness Council said they want to standardize requirements such as the information that long-distance shoppers must receive and the right to pull out of contracts, to increase confidence in trading outside their home countries. The draft consumer rights directive, originally proposed by the EC in 2008, applies to remote and off-premises contracts between a public or private trader and a consumer, except in industries including gambling, the council said. Digital content such as computer programs, games or songs not burned onto tangible media aren’t considered goods, but CDs, DVDs, memory cards and the like are, it said. Digital downloads made under service contracts entered into electronically and performed immediately will also come under the directive, but consumers won’t have the 14-day cooling-off period that other remote buyers get, it said. The measure requires merchants to give consumers all mandatory information clearly and comprehensibly and get consent before imposing extra charges on sales transactions. The EC called the council action a “breakthrough” that will make it easier for people to shop online and will increase legal certainty for cross-border sellers. But the European Consumers’ Organization said the council vote was “something of an anticlimax” in relation to what was supposed to become a milestone of EU consumer legislation. There are several advances -- the measure counters problems with online purchases such as Internet cost traps -- Deputy Director General Ursula Pachl told us, but that shouldn’t distract from a recommendation of full harmonization of rights, diluting national consumer laws and foreclosing tougher rules. The council also “walked away from the opportunity” to provide what’s really needed, a set of modern rights for digital products, she said. European consumers have no clear entitlements, so in effect they have no protection in buying downloaded music, video and software, Pachl said. The directive is the right vehicle for this but the council chose instead the consumer-unfriendly approach of excluding the right of withdrawal from such products, she said. What remains is merely a review of the current remote and off-premises selling directive, which doesn’t add much value for consumers, she said. The European Parliament Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee votes on the proposal Feb. 1, and a plenary vote is likely in April, a committee spokeswoman said.
Europe’s satellite navigation systems are making progress but face “fresh challenges,” the European Commission said in a midterm report on Galileo and the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay System. The programs have been slowed by cost overruns, price increases and lack of competition in some contract awards, it said. The economic situation of the EU and its members has led the EC not to ask for additional money in the current budget, but that decision, too, is causing delays and increasing costs, the EC said. And political decisions on the governance and financing of the projects are needed, it said.
Key telecom priorities of Hungary, which assumes the EU presidency Jan. 1, are “strategy, security and spectrum policy,” Information and Communications Minister Zsolt Nyitrai said. The byword for the term will be “continuity” of ongoing work on the Europe 2020 strategy, the country’s foreign minister said at a Tuesday news briefing. That work includes several communications items agreed upon in November 2009 by the then-upcoming Spanish, Belgian and Hungarian presidencies. Industry groups, meanwhile, urged the presidency to focus on fiber deployment and investment in new networks. ISPs said their priorities for coming months include EU-level talks on traffic data retention and ISP liability.
Telecom ministers Friday preliminarily rejected a European Commission call for all EU members to make the 800 MHz band, freed by digital switchover, available for wireless broadband by 2013. The proposal is part of the EC’s first multiyear radio spectrum policy program (RSPP). Government officials -- who discussed the plan but didn’t vote on it during a Telecommunications Council session in Brussels -- said they generally favor the EC effort, but the timetable for rollout of “digital dividend” spectrum is one of several provisions that raise national sovereignty concerns.
Information and communication technologies may be environmentally sustainable but not under “business as usual,” the Global Information Society Watch said Wednesday in a report. It was issued at the start of the U.N. climate change conference in Cancun, Mexico. The document, by the online social justice network Association for Progressive Communications and the Dutch Humanist Institute for Development Cooperation, sets out arguments for and against ICTs as a force for “greening” the environment. Understanding their sustainability requires examining the life cycle of electronic devices apart from the raw materials used through production, use and disposal, said Paul Mobbs of the U.K. Free Range Activism Website. There are serious questions about how long people will be able to use high-speed digital technologies before the “ecological limits” on production make them too rare or costly to be justified as another “invisible” element of the mass-consumption culture, he wrote. All devices, which at the simplest level are an assembly of millions of transistors, rely on the same raw materials for production, he said. The problem isn’t silicon, which is plentiful, but the minute amounts of rarer materials such as indium, hafnium, germanium and gallium needed for microchips, he said. Those minerals are only available in a few places and some governments argue that they're critical raw materials which should be protected, said Mobbs. Another important metal in the manufacture of miniaturized digital electronics is tantalum, half of the global supply of which is mined in Australia, he said. But 1-10 percent may be mined illegally in central Africa, perpetuating armed conflicts there, he said. Rare metals aren’t the only problem, he said. Rare minerals such as gold can theoretically reach peak production and then decline just as oil has, spurring illegal mining, he said. Another key sustainability issue is the chemicals used in consumer electronics devices, which can pollute local areas, Mobbs said. There’s also rising concern about the amount of electricity ICTs consume, and growing recognition that the production cycle uses more energy than the everyday use of the devices, he said. The debate over “green ICTs” shows how complex the issues are, and it’s not enough to focus on carbon emissions, he said. The ICT industry must “get its own house in order” instead of simply trying to help other sectors go green, said Hopeton Dunn of the University of the West Indies. The industry now accounts for around 2 percent of global carbon emissions, a number expected to mushroom as developing countries go digital and the number and size of data centers rise, he wrote. While the prognosis on the ICT sector’s own future contribution to climate change is “worrying,” there’s strong proof that the technologies can spark innovations and social and economic changes that can help cut carbon emissions, he said. One of the critical challenges now is to balance the competing demands for more widespread use of ICTs with their energy-efficient deployment and safer electronic waste disposal, he said. E-waste raises several issues requiring immediate attention, including a lack of data, how to finance e-waste management and allocate economic responsibilities along the downstream chain, and how to hold producers to account, said Panos London. Its website said it promotes inclusion of poor and marginalized people in development debates. The concept of a green economy raises key questions, the International Institute for Sustainable Development said, including: (1) Whether the increased energy and material efficiencies enabled by the Internet will boost consumption. (2) What the human impact is of the openness and dematerialization the Internet allows. (3) What new threats and vulnerabilities might arise in a world where human, material and natural systems are interconnected and hyperlinked in real time. Although the need for a green economy is now widely recognized, governments are slow to put policies in place and “powerful economic and political forces” often protect the status quo, it said.
Superfast broadband can’t happen in Europe without a level playing field for investors, Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes said Tuesday at a European Competitive Telecommunications Association regulatory conference in Brussels. A recent EC statement laid out the key principles on how to spur roll out of very high speed broadband, but it’s only one step, she said. One way to open market access and investment is for the EC to offer more guidance on how national regulators should apply important competition conditions such as fair pricing for providers seeking network access and non-discrimination for vertically integrated network operators, she said. Access fees must be set at a level that reflects the underlying cost, and should be calculated consistently, and regulators should be faithful to the costing model they choose, she said. Moreover, vertically integrated operators should not be allowed to discriminate against competitors in favor of their own downstream business, she said. Authorities must use strong enforcement to reduce the incentives and ability of dominant players to discriminate, and must measure how successful those obligations are in practice, she said. The revised telecom rules give the EC the power, in cases where its guidance doesn’t work, to open a second-stage investigation into whether competition requirements are being appropriately and consistently applied, and the EC is “ready to use this new tool,” she said. The EC “will be there to crack down” if needed, Kroes said. Wholesale charges significantly affect broadband retail prices and the level of choice in the market, and it’s vital that they're not set so high that they hurt consumers and competition, said ECTA Director Ilsa Godlovitch. Regulators must understand what network operators’ actual costs are and not accept a theoretical price that allows “supernormal profits on networks that have already been funded by taxpayers long ago,” she said. Competition authorities must also question whether investment in fiber networks is as risky as incumbents claim, she said. Network operators, however, warned that artificially reduced wholesale charges for copper networks will erode the price level on broadband markets, making fiber products less attractive as investments.
"We are not looking for additional regulation” on net neutrality, said the head of the EU telecom regulatory group. Revised telecom rules, many of which don’t take effect until June, must be given time to work before further legislation is introduced, John Doherty, chairman of the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications, said Thursday. But if there are significant, persistent problems, the EC won’t be afraid to act, said Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes. They spoke at a joint European Commission-European Parliament summit in Brussels on net neutrality and an open Internet. The discussion will feed into an EC report.
There are no problems with net neutrality in Europe and no regulation is needed, most stakeholders told a European Commission consultation on preserving an open Internet. Comments from 318 parties, including the Body of European Regulators of Electronic Communications (BEREC), operators, ISPs, national authorities, consumer and civil-society organizations and individuals showed “near consensus” on the importance of keeping the Internet open but no widespread call for further EU legislation, the EC said Tuesday. Most believe that traffic management supports efficient operation of the Internet and doesn’t hurt consumers, it said. BEREC found cases in which equal treatment of data wasn’t ensured, and that could raise concerns for competition and society, the EC said. Although net neutrality hasn’t been discussed intensively in many countries, there have been instances of peer-to-peer file-share throttling and of blocking VoIP services or additional charges for them, it said. But these issues were resolved voluntarily and many respondents said future net neutrality problems are hard to predict, it said. Some content providers worried that today’s relatively open Internet could suffer if new market structures, such as charging parties other than the end-user, emerge, it said. But operators said those concerns aren’t justified, because competition and transparent measures to ensure consumer choice can prevent pitfalls, it said. BEREC foresaw three potential issues, the EC said: Discrimination with anti-competitive effects; longer-term consequences for the Internet economy affecting freedom of expression and innovation; and consumer confusion or harm from lack of transparency. In general, however, most believe that the EU telecom regulatory framework can deal with the issues, it said. Most commenters agreed that traffic management is essential for Internet operations but that it shouldn’t give preferential treatment to one service over another or allow deep packet inspection, which raises privacy and data protection issues. Many also said consumers should be given information about traffic management but transparency alone isn’t enough to relieve current and future net neutrality concerns. Respondents also agreed that traffic management principles should apply to fixed and mobile networks. They split on whether the same quality of service conditions should apply to all managed services but generally agreed that additional rules on such services aren’t needed. Many, including operators and some content providers, said regulation to set minimum QoS standards for Internet access would stifle innovation. Respondents had various ideas about how to determine minimum QoS standards, some warning that effective monitoring of QoS would be a tough task. The EC and European Parliament will discuss an upcoming EC report on net neutrality at a summit Thursday.