European Lawmakers Prepare to Vote on ‘Net Neutrality’

The online habits of customers, and their ability to pay, are the focus of digital policy legislation on which lawmakers from the European Union’s 28 member countries plan to vote in Brussels. A key part of the legislation is so-called network neutrality.

The rules are meant to ensure equitable access to Internet’s pipelines for services like streaming music, on-demand television and cloud computing. The big questions are who pays for them, and how much. The proposed rules have drawn furious lobbying from telecommunications companies like Vodafone, Internet giants like Google and smaller players like Spotify, and advocacy groups on behalf of the European Union’s 500 million consumers. The battle is akin to a struggle playing out in the United States but with its own European twists. The outcome could help determine whether the financial incentives are in place to pay for the multibillion-euro investments needed to upgrade Europe’s patchy mobile and landline Internet infrastructure, which in the absence of Continentwide rules has slipped ever farther behind the more advanced data networks of North America and Asia.