Paris, 29 June 2015 — The Council of the European Union is looking to remove all reference to Net Neutrality in the regulation of telecommunications. While the Council has always refused to take a step towards a compromise, it has been looking for several weeks to put the responsibility for the failure of the negotiations on the European Parliament. Thus, it is with bad faith that the Council is taking on this 4th trialogue today ; with their aim to make the Parliament to give in.



Net Neutrality occupies an important place in the negotiations of the text on the regulation of telecommunications. Indeed, the Council is only trying to insert provisions likely to please big telco companies: authorisation of Deep Packet Inspection, price discrimination, suppression of all reference to Net Neutrality that would assure non-discrimination and equality in everyone’s data.

Since the beginning of the trialogue, the Council never stopped deleting any disposition in favour of rights and interests of European citizens. It bases itself on a cowardly disregard, indeed malice, of the European Commission regarding Net Neutrality, but also on the differences of opinion within the Parliament. So, as the negotiators are divided – with Michel Reimon leading those in favour of Net Neutrality against the rapporteur Pilar del Castillo with the telecoms companies – the Council is playing the troublemaker.

This bad faith on the part of the Council is unacceptable. Its attempt one more time to favour powerful companies at the expense of citizens and their insidious efforts to divide the Parliament are completely irresponsible. The French government is no exception: having fought Net Neutrality for a long time it attempts to improve its image without ever providing a clear definition of this principle and by refusing that any definition be included in EU law.

While the author of the notion of Net Neutrality, professor Tim Wu, is worried about the European negotiations on this matter, he declared last week that “the Internet in Europe will never recover if those propositions [from the Council] are adopted”. Besides, such dispositions could secure the dominance of US platforms in Europe.

La Quadrature du Net calls on Member States to respect EU citizens through legislative tools which would ensure their access to the Internet without discrimination, and to accept the initial proposals of the European Parliament, which proposed a balance between protection of rights and freedoms of users on the one hand and innovation and free competition on the other.

While Europe risks having its fragile democratic institutions collapse, the European Parliament has even increased responsibilities towards all citizens. La Quadrature du Net calls on the European Parliament to remain faithful to their vote from April 2014 and to remain very firm over the provisions favorable to the preservation of a neutral Internet, democratic and innovative.

“The Council can not continue to violate the rights and freedoms of citizens. Their attempts to focus on the European Parliament as being responsible for the failure of negotiations will not allow them to hide their own inability to bring European democratic values and defend the fundamental rights of citizens,” said Agnès de Cornulier, coordinator of legal and policy analysis for La Quadrature du Net.

Main issues in the current document: