SENSE4US

Are our politicians doing enough to ensure the internet is ‘free and open’?

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Category: Blog

Created on Tuesday, 08 April 2014 09:26

It should be unthinkable for a politician to be anti-digital, or indeed anti-internet – after all we rely on the net for our entertainment, travel, learning, jobs and our future economy.

Can you imagine a world in which you have to pay a little extra to see the occasional YouTube clip? A place where there is a small charge for every iPlayer episode you watch? What about a world where it is free and quick to upload photos to your internet service provider’s photo sharing service but it takes hours to do the same using flickr? Or horror of horrors, what about a world where your ISP has done a deal with Microsoft, and you can quickly access Bing, but Google is strangely unresponsive.

Happily, that’s a world we are unlikely to wake up to any time soon. That is because the European Parliament has decided that network neutrality should be included in its ‘Connected Continent’ regulations. Net neutrality being the principle that all internet traffic regardless of source, destination or type must be treated equally. In essence, the foundation of a free and open internet.

The full article by Andy Halsall on Policy Review