Following what is widely regarded as a victory for strong net neutrality in the US, the battle to maintain a level playing-field online has now moved to the European Union, with the relaunch today of the campaign site "Save the Internet: Defend Net Neutrality in Europe." Its aim is to head off an attempt by a majority of the 28 EU Member States in the Council of the European Union to derail earlier proposals to enshrine net neutrality in European law, as Ars reported last month.

The EU's net neutrality bill began as a 2013 proposal from the European Commission. It contained a number of major loopholes. In particular, it would have allowed "specialized services" that had privileged access to the Internet—and thus broke net neutrality. The proposal also explicitly allowed the discriminatory blocking of websites, applications, and content, a clear threat to freedom of expression in Europe.

Those loopholes and discriminatory measures were removed when the 751 MEPs in the European Parliament voted in favor of a modified version of the text in April 2014. Last month, the third EU institution, the Council of the European Union, made up of representatives of the Member State governments, revised the text again, reinstating many of the original problems.

In an e-mail to Ars, Jim Killock, executive director the UK's Open Rights Group (ORG), one of the organizations behind the new initiative, explained the problems with the current draft: "It allows more or less any kind of discrimination for supposed premium services: in other words, it lets ISPs discriminate for commercial purposes. This is much more than dealing with congestion and the consequences of under-investment. It is about ISPs being able to carve up greater niches and extract money as gatekeepers."

To resolve the conflicting views, the negotiations have entered a phase called the "trialogue," when all three EU institutions gather behind closed doors to come up with a common position. This necessarily represents a compromise, whose exact contours depend upon the relative determination of the three groups to see their views enshrined in the final text.

The latest Save the Internet initiative—the third since the site was originally launched in January 2014—encourages EU citizens to write to their MEPs, asking them to resist attempts to undermine net neutrality in the final text. Joe McNamee, executive director of European Digital Rights, another of the digital rights organizations behind the "Save the Internet" campaign, told Ars, "The [European] Parliament voted clearly and by a big majority in favor of net neutrality. They need to stand behind this decision and not be manipulated, bullied, or misled into weakening their position. We need to show them that citizens support them and the position that they took," he said.

Matters are complicated by the fact that since the net neutrality regulations were originally proposed in 2013, there has been a change of EU commissioners. Replacing Neelie Kroes, who was seen as being broadly in support of net neutrality, is Günther Oettinger. He recently made the following comments that show a very different view of the issues—and a surprising belief that car safety systems will be using the general Internet to exchange real-time data:

Net neutrality: here we’ve got, particularly in Germany, Taliban-like developments. We have the Internet community, the Pirates on the move, it’s all about enforcing perfect uniformity. They talk about “the evil industry.” It’s not about the industry, it’s not about the CEO and his salary. If you want to have real-time road safety, our lives are at stake. This has to have absolute priority with regards to quality and capacity. ... Is it more important, that in the car—the six-year-old daughter sitting in the back on the right, downloading music, YouTube, and on the left the nine-year-old rascal doing some random games—is it more important that those two [have a] real-time [connection] or that the old man in front hears in real time that someone is approaching from the right? I think downloading YouTube can wait a few seconds. I think we can let the game at some times be less than perfect on the screen. But road safety (a commercial service!), health (a commercial service!) and a few others come to my mind: they should be able to deviate from net neutrality, this Taliban-like issue.

The Save the Internet campaign is backed by most of the main digital rights organizations in Europe, including many of those that led to the defeat of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) in Europe in 2012. A big problem is getting enough of the public interested in what can seem a very obscure, technical topic.

As one of Germany's most influential tech bloggers, Markus Beckedahl, wrote in an e-mail to Ars, "There was lots of reporting in media this year around the FCC [net neutrality] thing. Unfortunately, there was more reporting on what's happening in the USA than around EU-issues. Net neutrality and EU together seems to be too complex." That's troubling since, as the ORG's Killock points out, "The EU is making an historic decision that could change the kind of Internet we have."