Net Neutrality: BEREC’s “consultation” (or the discouragement policy)

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Paris, 7 June 2016 — BEREC1European Regulators for Electronic Communications just published its draft guidelines that aims at clarifying the telecoms regulation2The regulation was adopted on 25 November 2015 and entered into force in April 2016 and therefore the net neutrality. After secret negotiations between the national regulators (ARCEP in France) within BEREC it seems that nothing was put in place in order to facilitate the consultation process. La Quadrature du Net calls on all Internet users who care about a strong defense of net neutrality to join and to respond together to this consultation.

The draft guidelines are only published in English and this doesn’t make the reading of a technical text easy for non-native English speakers. On the other hand the only way to answer to the consultation is to send an email that doesn’t exceed 2MB and preferably in English, even though nothing is specified concerning the way answers in other languages will be taken into account.

In order to compensate the lack of transparency of this procedure and the negotiations, La Quadrature du Net in cooperation with other organisations launched in March a consultation that is still available and also a platform that enables people to reveal any infringement of net neutrality from operators within the European Union.

Today we want to enable as many people as possible to take part in the consultation. This is why we publish BEREC’s guidelines on a platform that allows comments: thus everyone will be able to take part in a transparent manner and help us to formulate collectively our answers to the consultation. This approach also aims at inviting everyone to give their opinion to BEREC.

In order to make the guidelines even more accessible we suggest to work collaboratively on a translation into French.

We invite everyone to take part in this consultation and to reclaim this issue that should not remain the private preserve of the big telecom operators.

To comment the guidelines, click here.

References

References
1 European Regulators for Electronic Communications
2 The regulation was adopted on 25 November 2015 and entered into force in April 2016

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