Three key takeaways from Europe’s new net neutrality guidelines

[Commentary] On Aug 30, the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communication (BEREC) released their network neutrality guidelines. To recap, the European Union's net neutrality rules came into effect April 30; BEREC’s task has been to create the guidelines for implementing these rules. While BEREC’s chairman promised that their work would stay faithful to the law, the end result indicates something different. What’s in the new updated guidelines? Here are three key takeaways:

1. Content application providers have the same rights as as human users.
2. Traffic management remains murky and complex.
3. National regulatory authorities have many new obligations.

What happens next? Most likely, litigation.

[Roslyn Layton is a PhD Fellow at the Center for Communication, Media, and Information Technologies (CMI) at Aalborg University in Copenhagen, Denmark]