By: MarkJ - 21 January, 2012 (7:46 AM) - Score: 2103 - Fixed Line Broadband, Mobile Broadband

The France-based La Quadrature du Net, a civil society group that promotes online rights and freedoms, has claimed that broadband ISPs and Mobile Broadband operators in more than 14 EU Member States are engaging in "illegitimate restrictions" of their customers' Internet access and damaging Net Neutrality (the principal of treating all internet traffic as equal).

The "evidence", which has been submitted to European regulators for further investigation, was gathered by their RespectMyNet.eu website. The site allows people to submit reports about whether or not their ISP is imposing tough restrictions upon internet traffic.

Apparently this reveals how ISPs that account for the majority of the EU population have been found to violate "their users' freedom of communication by blocking or throttling specific content, applications or services available on the Internet".


The site itself includes a number of complaints against UK providers, especially mobile operators, many of which are said to block and or throttle VoIP (e.g. Skype) and P2P (e.g. BitTorrent) traffic. However, most of the UK reports come from individuals and have not been confirmed, although many providers are known to impose such restrictions.

At present both the EU and UK have, due to a lack of supporting evidence, chosen to adopt a "wait and see" approach on enforcement. Both want ISPs to ensure that any restrictions are made clearly visible to consumers. Providers have also been warned to ensure that consumers are still given access to all "legal content [and] service[s]" (here and here).

It should be said that most ISPs employ Traffic Management or Traffic Shaping as a perfectly acceptable means to balance the performance of their networks, which allows the majority of customers to avoid being unfairly affected by a minority of heavy users.

This is often done by restricting internet traffic (speed) to busy services (e.g. P2P) or more generally at peak times of day. ISPs often view measures like this as preferable to either raising prices or being more realistic about their usage restrictions.

Crucially consumer broadband is a shared "best efforts" service and ISPs do not provide dedicated bandwidth to home users. But absolute blocks or restrictions that throttle a service to the point of being practically unusable should still be questioned.

It will be interesting to see whether or not La Quadrature du Net's evidence has any tangible impact upon EU rules and regulations. Meanwhile the issue is still being debated and some political quarters have proposed tougher rules to prevent abuses (here).