The French digital rights organisation La Quadrature du Net claims to have obtained a leaked copy of a "non-paper" on the hotly-contested matter of net neutrality, apparently written by the presidency of the Council of the EU, currently held by Latvia. As well as completely gutting protection for net neutrality in the EU, the "non-paper" also postpones and waters down earlier proposals to abolish mobile roaming charges.

The heavily edited document removes every reference to net neutrality (PDF), right from the opening Article 1 of Annex II, which sets out "Object and Scope." This is changed from: "This Regulation establishes common rules on aiming at ensuring open internet access offered by providers of electronic communications to the public, safeguarding end-users' rights and ensuring non-discriminatory treatment of traffic" to simply: "This Regulation establishes common rules to ensure open internet access."

Article 2's definition of net neutrality—"the principle according to which all internet traffic is treated equally, without discrimination, restriction or interference, independently of its sender, recipient, type, content, device, service or application"—is deleted completely. Similarly, the definition for "internet access service" sees the key phrase "in accordance with the principle of net neutrality" removed.

According to the leak's proposed text, traffic management measures no longer need to be "compliant with the principle of equal treatment," but "shall be based on objectively different technical quality of service requirements of specific classes of traffic." That would allow different types of traffic to be throttled to different degrees on the same connection.

As its name suggests, this "non-document" is just a proposal from the presidency for a meeting of the EU Council, made up of representatives of EU governments, which was held yesterday. However, the fact that every mention of net neutrality was excised from the existing text is a clear indication that there is no interest in protecting it among this group. According to La Quadrature du Net, the presidency has adopted this anti-net neutrality position "as a bargaining chip to get a compromise on roaming, perceived as more consensual, allegedly easier to understand and more marketable to voters."

In contrast to the Council, the European Parliament has been fighting hard for its constituents by seeking to enshrine net neutrality in law. The European Commission's position is somewhere in the middle between those two other institutions. The divergences will be discussed at the next "trilogue"—the "informal tripartite meetings attended by representatives of the European Parliament, the Council and the Commission." But assuming this latest leak is genuine, as seems likely, things are not looking good for net neutrality in Europe.