La Quadrature du Net answers to BEREC EU consulation on Net Neutrality

Paris, 18 July 2016 — Today ends the BEREC consultation on Net Neutrality. This consultation aimed at consulting the people on the guidelines clarifying the implementation of the telecom regulation¹The regulation was adopted on 25 November 2015 and entered into force in April 2016. The version sent by La Quadrature du Net is the one written by the FDN Federation, we believe this answer is appropriate and we support its provisions.

La Quadrature du Net would like to stress the following issues raised by the FFDN answer:

• in section 5, on zero-rating, the approach proposed, based on a clear reading of the Regulation and Directives, is the one which should prevail to protect the end-used free-speech and open society on an open network.
• in section 7, the questions about how end-users or civil society organisations can protect their rights, about the procedures leading to litigation, are important; LQDN is a civil society organisation which aims to protect citizens rights and liberties in the digital environment, and the absence of those subjects in the present guidelines is worrying.
• in section 8, the provisions proposed by BEREC to get end-user empowerment are too weak, and we do support the remarks from FFDN requiring stronger tools on this point.

Also, La Quadrature du Net would like to stress its dissatisfaction on the fact that the consultation was only available for English-speaking citizens which severely shrunk the pool of possible participants and hindering the democratic nature of the consultation. Only very few European citizens could participate to this consultation although all of them will be affected by its results. This lead to the creation of a multilingual citizen-lead consultation with the Save The Internet coalition. This consultation gathered nearly half a million comments that will be sent to the BEREC expressing the important interest of EU citizens for this subject.

As stated in one of our press release, the wording of the guidelines and the very obscure procedure sum to the global lack of transparency of this consultation. As La Quadrature du Net was present from the very beginning of the legislative procedure, we regret the lack of transparency of this stage of the procedure.