BEREC (Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications) has produced a guideline document on the implementation of the recently enacted EU Net Neutrality rules. Adoption of the Regulation (EU) 2015/2120 that provided an Open Internet to people in the European Union led to BEREC delivering the guideline.
The 45 page document covers various guidelines for the particular Articles in the regulation. These inform the NRA (National Regulatory Authorities) that are responsible for enforcing these in each country.
The universal service requirement ensures end-users should be able to reach “virtually all end points” of the Internet. Access to both IPv4 and IPv6 network address spaces is not an obligation for service providers. This is a short-coming, as IPv6 adoption becomes important for access to larger portions of the internet. It does, instead, protect the smaller service providers which face costs in implementing a full IPv6 infrastructure. So with this decision, full IPv6 deployment across the EU is pushed into the future.
They do however, ensure that there will be no sub-standard services. Preventing certain protocols by contract is a regulation infringement. Services providers cannot define a limited service portfolio in an effort to avoid the requirements of these regulations.
It is possible to limit the volume and/or speed of access as a commercial agreement between the service provider and end-user. Limits delivered in an application agnostic way, not focused on specific applications, are allowed. Limiting or controlling specific protocols (such as VoIP, or Netflix traffic) are not allowed. Service providers must manage traffic “without discrimination, restriction or interference”; “irrespective of the sender and receiver, the content accessed or distributed, the applications or services used or provided, or the terminal equipment used”.
Equal treatment does not necessarily mean the end-users get the same network performance or quality of service. Packets can experience varying transmission performance such as latency and jitter. Packets are equally considered if they are processed agnostically of sender or receiver, to the content and to the application and service.
ISPs that implement mechanisms that assist protocols that manage congestion in the end-points (e.g. TCP) are compliant with equal treatment, so long as they are agnostic to the applications. Traffic management should be transparent, non-discriminatory and proportionate. There is a reference that optimising overall transmission quality and experience do allow differentiation between objectively different types of traffic (e.g. VoIP compared to P2P traffic). Encrypting traffic doesn’t preclude its treatment in the same way as unencrypted traffic. But the service provider must do this without monitoring the content. IP and TCP header information can be inspected, but payload information (such as HTTP URLs) cannot.
These practices must be measured and reported to the NRA to ensure compliance with the regulation. There are other regulations relating to contracts; to how data for bundled applications is treated and others within the BEREC guidelines. This looks like a comprehensive and reasonable response, but allows a lot of flexibility in the implementation.