Does Neelie’s Compact for the Internet signal the end of net neutrality in Europe?
Neelie Kroes has made another speech: Taking care of the Internet.
It’s another act of political ambiguity full of high-sounding phrases that mean nothing. Even the title is ambiguous: taking care as in nurturing, or taking care as in solving a problem? She has this vision of the internet, her ‘Internet Essentials’. She calls it her ‘Compact for the internet’:
Civic responsibility
One Internet that is
Multi-stakeholder
Pro-democracy
Architecturally sound, inspiring
Confidence and
Transparently governed
It’s nothing more than a contorted sound bite, and when policy is forced into suiting a sound bite we do not get good governance. (Being mono-lingual I can only guess at the effort that has to go into producing multi-lingual sound bite anagrams – or do we have different policies to suit different languages?)
But basically it is the traditional eurocrat speech: I’m good, I believe in freedom, but I may have to exercise control for the benefit of everyone. One paragraph, a single sentence, stands out as being full of platitudinal menace:
Ultimately, different actors have different fields of expertise and responsibility: that must be respected, and due weight must be given accordingly.
That sounds to me like the nail in the coffin of net neutrality.
