Big news out of the Netherlands this week, where a government minister announced plans to guarantee network neutrality by law. If Parliament approves the amendment to Dutch telecommunications law, and it's expected to do so, it would become one of the first countries in the world to legislate against Internet providers who want to charge more for using particular applications or services.

What led to the change? A classic case of overreaching.

"It's not OK"

It has been an open secret in Europe for some time that mobile operators like to block or discriminate against Internet services which compete with their legacy offerings. Skype and similar voice services are the most obvious targets, but newer tools like WhatsApp (which offers text-messaging style communications over the Internet) have also been targets. Many mobile operators stand to make less money from selling pure data packages than they did when they could also charge separately for text messaging and voice minutes; some have simply decided to bill more for Internet services that compete with those offerings.

As European Commissioner Neelie Kroes—who happens to be Dutch—noted recently, "Blocking or charging extra fees for VoIP has been reported on mobile operators in Austria, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Romania." And she made clear that she would not stand for it much longer:

Mark my words: if measures to enhance competition are not enough to bring Internet providers to offer real consumer choice, I am ready to prohibit the blocking of lawful services or applications. It's not OK for Skype and other such services to be throttled.

But even in the face of this high-level resistance to such plans, major Dutch telecommunications company KPN went ahead with new plans to charge extra for certain Internet services, notably Skype and WhatsApp. The company then admitted on an earnings call what most people suspected: it would be using deep packet inspection hardware to monitor all Internet traffic and classify it by application in order to make the new charging scheme work.

The decision kicked up huge controversy in the Netherlands, and this week Maxime Verhagen, the Minister of Economic affairs, Agriculture, and Innovation, announced in Parliament a plan to ban the practice.

"Some providers of mobile internet had announced a surcharge for specific services," said Verhagen's press release after the announcement (e-mailed to us and helpfully translated by a Dutch Ars reader). "This is because of the needed investments in the network and the decline in voice and SMS traffic. Minister Verhagen isn’t against paying for the quantity or the speed of the data traffic. The Cabinet, however, is of the opinion that a surcharge on specific services like Skype or WhatsApp goes too far."

Verhagen will draft a net neutrality proposal in the next few weeks, one that will give users confidence that "specific Internet service on their mobile will not be additionally taxed or blocked by mobile providers."

Talk about scoring an own goal.