Late last week, a new consultation was announced in Europe: Digital Agenda: Commission launches consultation on net neutrality
A consultation on key questions arising from the issue of net neutrality has been launched by the European Commission today. It covers such issues as whether internet providers should be allowed to adopt certain traffic management practices, prioritising one kind of internet traffic over another, whether such traffic management practices may create problems and have unfair effects for users, whether the level of competition between different internet service providers and the transparency requirements of the new telecom framework may be sufficient to avoid potential problems by allowing consumers’ choice and whether the EU needs to act further to ensure fairness in the internet market, or whether industry should take the lead. [...] The consultation will feed into a Commission report on net neutrality, which should be presented by the end of this year. All interested parties – service and content providers, consumers, businesses and researchers – are invited to respond to the consultation by 30 September 2010.
The project as well as the tool (email) have been added to ParticipateDB.
A quick mention over on techPresident the other day quoted Neelie Kroes, EU Commissioner for the Digital Agenda, as saying “The process will be as open as the internet!”, which prompted me to file this comment:
Open consultation?
With regard to the European consultation on net neutrality, it’s interesting to note that their technology of choice is email, not any of the more advanced (more deliberative/collaborative/social) tools that are available. From the questionnaire: “Responses to this public consultation should reach the European Commission by 30 September 2010 at infso-netneutrality@ec.europa.eu.” Not that using email is a bad thing, necessarily, it just means that the input gathering process is fairly one-way and not as open as it could be (certainly not as “open as the internet”).
It’s also not entirely clear if and when any of the input will be made public. Again, from the questionnaire: “Contributions, together with the identity of the contributor, may be published on the website of the Directorate-General for Information Society and Media”. Maybe? Maybe not?
Hm…
Once again, it would be great to have a more comprehensive FAQ available for participants that outlines the complete participation process in more detail.
Related posts:
{ 2 trackbacks }