The US’s top media regulator hit back at critics of new net neutrality rules voted into law last week, comparing them to the first amendment and saying neither government nor private companies had the right to restrict the openness of the internet.

The Federal Communications Commission chairman, Tom Wheeler, was speaking in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress, the world’s largest telecoms trade show, just as European governments are meeting to thrash out their own principles for keeping the internet open.



“This is no more regulating the internet than the first amendment regulates free speech in our country,” Wheeler said. “If the internet is the most powerful and pervasive platform in the history of the planet, can it exist without a referee? There needs to be a referee with a yardstick, and that is the structure we have put in place. A set of rules that say activity should be just and reasonable, and somebody who can raise the flag if they aren’t.”

Telecoms companies across Europe and America have railed against Wheeler’s reforms, saying they will discourage investment in better cable and wireless networks and simply benefit bandwidth-hungry services like Netflix and YouTube, which do not normally pay for their content to be carried across the internet. In the US, Verizon and AT&T, the two largest mobile operators, have said they will try to reverse the new rules in the courts.

Meanwhile, Wheeler told conference attendees in Barcelona: “Those who were opposed to the open internet rules like to say this is Depression-era monopoly regulation. We built our model for net neutrality on the regulatory model that has been wildly successful in the US for mobile.”

The FCC rules will treat telecoms companies in a similar way to utilities such as electricity. Internet service providers will be explicitly prohibited from blocking, throttling or prioritising internet traffic for commercial reasons. Where complaints are raised, the FCC will decide on a case-by-case basis whether what network owners are doing is “fair and just”.

The FCC has said it would not intervene areas such as pricing, network unbundling and technical operating requirements.

The European parliament is in the midst of negotiations with member states and network operators over final net neutrality rules, which could be published later this spring. A source at one of Europe’s largest mobile carriers said the fear was that Europe would introduce similar rules, only to find itself out of step when the FCC is forced to back down by a legal challenge or a change of president.

Barack Obama was elected on a promise to preserve net neutrality and has been a staunch supporter of the new rules. But America will elect a new president in 2016 and Republicans have rallied against the regulation.

The chief executives of Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom said on Monday at Mobile World Congress that they should be allowed to prioritise the delivery of data for future services like heart monitors or connected cars, where an interrupted signal could compromise safety.

“We favour net neutrality, but we need to be allowed to have quality classes to enable new services in the internet of things,” said Deutsche Telekom’s chief executive, Tim Höttges.

Proposals put forward by the Latvian presidency of the European Council, leaked to the Financial Times, suggest corporate and individual customers should be able to pay for faster internet services, although these could not be allowed to impair other internet traffic in any “material manner”. The proposals would enshrine a principle of net neutrality but allow network owners to shape the flow of traffic. Any suggestion of a two-speed internet will be fiercely resisted by open-internet campaigners.

But European executives are not convinced such developments would be banned in America. Vodafone boss Vittorio Colao told journalists on Monday: “I have asked explicitly to the chairman of the FCC, ‘So, are specialised services, fast lanes and quality of service forbidden or not?’ The answer is no, they are not forbidden. We understand that they will be there. Are they explicitly authorised? No, they are not.

“Americans are great pragmatists so they will do what is right.”