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So the next talk is done by Thomas Lubanga, who I remember from his speech at Deutsche Telekom, where he talked about zero rating and about the telecom implementing it first dream on. And, um, yeah, he's the CEO of the works, uh, formerly known as Foghat in Austria. And he's also a frequent guest at the podcast and Lookbook Brunette's politic, where we can hear him talking about net neutrality, which is his really, really special topic. Um, he's going to tell us about, um, the law of net neutrality in Europe and how it is implemented, how it is controlled and how offers like zero rating are violating it. Please give a warm round of applause to Thomas. OK, thanks, everyone. Good. So I'm going to talk a little bit about net neutrality enforcement in the European Union, as you might know, we have a quite a long tradition about net neutrality in Europe. The debate has been going on for many years. And we are now at a point where we have legislation that covers all of Europe and protects the Internet. But now it's about the tricky parts of actually getting it enforced. Um, this is not so much a beginner stock, but still, I would like to briefly explain what net neutrality is in case you need a reminder. So net neutrality protects the Internet from interference from the network operators that control the physical infrastructure of the Internet. And it keeps us in control about deciding which services we want to use or want to offer without any gatekeepers in between. And usually those interferences in the network happen in two ways, either technically by slowing down, blocking or prioritizing traffic or in an economical sense, by making certain applications more expensive than others. So this is the basic principle, but to really understand why net neutrality matters, we have to remind ourselves why the Internet is different in previous different communication networks. In a television system, usually you are a receiver and you cannot really start your own television seri
es from from a home yard. But in the Internet, everyone can use and offer services. It's a bidirectional network. And it's also different than the telephone system, because until after you have a centralized, controlled entity decides whether or not you can make this call between those two end points. And it also gives those two main points in their connection, a dedicated price per unit, which is also different from a global packet switch network as the Internet is. So much for the basics. We are not in the vacuum here in Europe, we have in this talk I compare what's happening here in Europe with the situation in the U.S., as I'm sure most of you have heard, there are some quite some big change recently and also in India, which we do not hear that much about, but which is also a really interesting point of comparison for us here in Europe. What combines those three areas is the way in which net neutrality was enshrined, and it was always a bottom up movement from protests on the street, from academia's Liberian's start startups, from many different people that came together and decided net neutrality is not just a good idea, it ought to be the law. And of course, the debate in the US was, um, long lasting. So they started in 2007 and we are now in the fifth iteration. In our first, we prevented a battle on net neutrality and then we established a weak law. Then this law was lost in court and we established another one. And now recently in mid-December, we lost those rules in the US, in the EU, which is different. We had a really stony path towards the European regulation, which means it is a law which is directly applicable to all of the European Union. So we have one legal basis and then many different regulators that now have to really use that law. The telecom regulators will be a big point of discussion in this talk. In India, it is kind of similar. So there you had a huge pushback against Facebook trying to more or less replace the Internet in India for a larg
e part of the population, and Indians stood up to prevent it. And now India has really good protection or net neutrality. And again, it is regulation. So it's not really a law, but it is covered by the ministry. So it is a little bit more solid legal standing than in the U.S., where every new administration can more or less appoint a chairperson to the FCC and overdone overdo everything that their predecessors have done. If we compare the content of the three different regulations, we have very similar situation in Europe and the U.S., actually. So blocking or throttling is prohibited periodization, specialized services, which basically means those things which are not the Internet, but run over the same pipes and we have device freedom. So we cannot be discriminated for being iOS or Android users or using Linux or any other hardware. So network operators cannot dictate which devices we use. And then it's the tricky part. We have weak case by case rulings on zero rating, which means making data less expensive or interconnection, which is the area where Twisp is actually exchange data between each other. And there is something unique in Europe. Um, the law gives us the right that we no longer just have up to a certain speed of our Internet connection, but instead we have also a minimum average and maximum speeds that should be in the contract of every fixed line Internet connection. You might wonder because you might not have seen those. And that's part of the weak for enforcement at all. Talk about and in India, at least previously, we only had rules and zero rating. So given those rules, why aren't we done? Why do we still need to talk about net neutrality? The thing is, in the world of telecom regulation, you have those weird entities called telecom regulatory authorities short answers. And they are they like the police and the judge when it comes to net neutrality, they oversee the market and implement rules. So we have to really work with those guys and make the
m to do their job. Regulation works a little bit like the old story of the stick and the carrot. So regulators can use carrots to give companies something which is an incentive for them to make them behave, or they can use the stick to punish them, issue fines, or in the worst case, even take away their license. And at the end, you know, we are dealing with multibillion multinational companies that need to abide by the law. And so, of course, they are very different interests. Regulators have a problem of revolving doors. So if you look at the personnel of several owners of several regulatory authorities, you see that those people all have histories in the industry. And usually it's quite a fast rate from the industry to the authority from the government. It should oversee the same industry. And so, of course, there is particularly a strong revolving door between large countries that have state owned or partly state owned telecom companies like Deutsche Telekom or France Telecom and Regulatory Authority, which is usually a little bit more lenient towards this company that also contributes to the government's income. Not important thing to know is those those authorities have a limited budget. So in some cases, they only can afford X amount of cases. And so that would have an incentive to only pick cases which they are sure they can win, which makes them a little bit cowardice. So how did we enforce how did those regulatory authorities actually use the law? And I have a little bit of statistic here with their activities that you would expect them to do now that we have net neutrality in order to make it work and the percentage of countries that have actually done it and which were good countries. And bear in mind with me, we have the net neutrality law in Europe covers 31 countries. That means that you 28 member states and the European economic area, free countries. But in this survey, we are we're missing, too. So it's only just 29 countries. That's why this statist
ic is off. So only 17 percent. So five venerates updated their website. In most countries, if you are a user, you see a problem online charity, you go to the right authority. But still you are, let alone you don't have any information on actually how to submit a violation, a dedicated complaint mechanisms for net neutrality. Only France has this. So three percent, at least half of the entries offer the users a speed test to measure their own connection. And we heard before we now have a right for an average Internet speech. But still, how to get that right is still quite questionable. Um, and then really measuring the Internet on a whole to really see if there is blocking or throttling that might not every user see very few entries are actually doing that, which is a huge problem. And then the most weird part you would expect of a multi-billion company is not obliging the law if it breaks the law, actually, that there would be penalties, but there are a few countries for that do not even have penalties. So there is no price tag attached to violating net neutrality. And I would play a little bit of game. What do you think, what is the highest penalty for net neutrality in Europe? It's actually three million or 10 percent of the annual turnover, which is quite high, so you would think, wow, this is really preventing companies from misbehaving. If you look at the lowest penalty, it's 250 euros in Bulgaria. That's Europe. And now let's go back to the graphic that we have before of the types of discrimination with the things that we are actually protected against with the European legislation and how well those have been implemented. When it comes to blocking and throttling, we see problems blocking not so much, but throttling, particularly of video streaming content that is very widespread as part of the zero rating offers. And so this type of throttling is really frustrating all around Europe. And regulators are really slow to act like we have seen now in Germany, wher
e it took the German regulator from April to December to come to a decision. And now this decision will be upheld in court for probably two years. So streetman is here to stay, and that's part because of these problems. Paid prioritization, not really an issue. Specialized services, we haven't seen them yet. But in the next two or three years, when 5G is rolled out, we'll see a huge push from the industry to reinvent the Internet, repackage it as specialized services. And 5G gives them a little bit of a technological background to argue why these should be specialized services. And here, the problem of the missing measurement comes back to haunt us because specialized services should not eat into the bandwidth of the open Internet. But if the regulator is not measuring how good the quality of the Internet in a country actually is, you don't know if it gets worse with specialized services. Device freedom is not really a problem, tattering blockade's or something like that were a big problem in Eastern Europe. Those problems are distinct and then the minimum, maximum and average speeds. That's the big problem that we still have, because only about 48 percent of the countries have actually implemented that properly. And that's why you don't see those really basic statistics about the thing that you're buying. And this is also something that is not really a net neutrality issue. But here in Europe it is. And it's also something that, particularly in rural areas, is important, because if you ISP is not offering is not really delivering the speed that you're paying for, you have the right to exit the contract interconnection, the part where ISPs exchange data between the networks. We just don't know because this area usually has no end user involvement. There are very, very few statistics. And you mostly rely on whistleblowers or people in the Internet exchange shops that give us information. But we cannot really say whether or not it is working in that field. But now to 
the biggest problem. 080. Zero rating, explain a little bit more in detail is the practice of accepting certain applications from your monthly data volume. If you have a mobile, a fixed line, volume based offer, and so you have your two gigabytes and then Spotify does not count towards that. That would be a classical zero rating deal. So certain data is more expensive. And to partner services offering. Isn't that nice? So this type of net neutrality violation we see in almost all European countries, so 86 percent of the countries have at least one. For the most part, it's several zero rating offers out there in the market and that for several years already, if we only look at those 25 countries that have that problem, just to go back once, mostly to countries which don't have zero rating, are the ones with which don't have data volumes. So, dear, if you buy a SIM card, you buy a SIM card with an offer of a certain bandwidth and speed, but the volume is unlimited. And then, of course, the zero rating problem is also solved. But in the 25 countries where we have to fight about that, only 11. Had formal investigation into these practices in the in the other countries, the regulator did not even look at the products there, according to what they told the European regulators. And so out of these 11 countries where we at least had a look, if zero rating is legal or not, what do you think? How many how many products were prohibited? How many injuries stood up against the industry and said, no, this is illegal? Not a single case of zero rating has been decided in favor of net neutrality in Europe, which is exactly the same number of zero rating cases which were ruled by the FCC in the US. So not a single one, which means the case by case rule on zero rating is not working. There has been only one case, to my knowledge, where a case by case rule and zero rating led to the prohibition of such a product. And that was in Canada already a few years ago. But the problem is we hav
e products like this from Portugal, from the Portuguese incumbent, you know, this is the biggest telecom company in Portugal. If you buy enough, if you buy Internet from them with a SIM card, you get 500 megabyte. And then if you really want to use the Internet, you have to buy Dell's application specific bundles. And those are not really zero rating. You just buying 10 gigabytes of WhatsApp or 10 gigabytes of Spotify and SoundCloud. And this is still not prohibited in Portugal. That's about the level of scrutiny that the telecom regulators have shown us so far. Going back to the legislative side, so this is this was the situation mid 2017. Then Trump came into office and he appointed a new chairperson to the FCC, Ajit Pai. This is him in a video as Santa Claus. And yes, this is real. This is not Photoshop. And those two guys then killed the U.S. net neutrality laws. They are gone. There's a hope to maybe get them back, either in court, which usually takes two years or via congressional review after politicians step up, which is unlikely with a Republican Congress, or the states could create a patchwork of net neutrality protections. If you have like California enshrining something in their law particularly, or forcing ISPs to do it. But also those are all just patchwork solutions, solutions. But there's also bright light. India, India only had a rule on zero rating before, but in December, they closed the gap on all the other net neutrality issues and came up again with the best legal solutions that I've seen. So the Indians are at the forefront of that issue. And, um, so we have a general picture of the U.S. really going down, India going up, and Europe is on a crossroads. So for us, the whole debate now is about enforcement and 2018. But then we will have another big discussion, because in April 2019, the European Commission, which is not really a fan of the beginning of the open Internet, um, they will have to release a report on whether or not to review the Eur
opean law on net neutrality. And then you have the industry pushing with 5G for regulatory Holliday's, which basically means just let us do our our market capitals and our new products without interference. We don't want the government to cut into whatever promises we make about 5G. And so there is a huge political pressure to go lenient on net neutrality while at the same time we already see that the current regime is not really working. And the way in which we enforce net neutrality, it's also worth to compare this approach, because both in the U.S. and in Europe, we have a so-called ex-post regulation. So only after the damage is done, the regulator might get active, start looking into it, have proceedings which usually take a few months, then deliberates, then maybe makes a decision, and then this decision can be held up in court. So we see this in Germany with Deutsche Telekom. Now already we see it in Belgium, we see it in Sweden and in the U.S., of course. I mean, they only started investigating zero rating right at the end of Obama's term when it was clear they could not really deliver. Contrary to that, in India, they have a really cool system, so as a telecom company, you are free to offer whatever product you like. But within seven days, the regulator takes a close look at it, tells you whether or not it's legal. And if it is not legal, then they might suspend your license to be a telecom operator in India. So net neutrality is tied into the license agreement in order to be a telecommunications operator in India. And if you think about. We actually I know that a few people from India are watching this talk, so thank you for giving them a round of applause. Um, and this is why it is working in India and they really take net neutrality series, which is also the right approach. If you think about the damage that is done to the market, to to innovation, to democracy, if suddenly ISPs start blocking or throttling or prioritizing only their own services. So giv
en the damage that can be caused by really taking the Internet away from a society, um, it is only the right approach to have a big stick here and not just a carrot. Finally, I would like to explain the Internet, but also to say that there has been a shift, we have good protections, at least better protection in Europe than in the US, particularly when it comes to zero rating. And that means that the telecom industry adopted its model. You know, you can molest they are like EPOs in the net neutrality debate. Originally, it was about blocking services you don't like, then it was about throttling BitTorrent because you don't want to clutter up your network. Then it was about giving preferential treatment, pay for a specialized service, pay to become curated. All of these things are hard to argue in Europe these days, and that's why the telecom industry came up with a new model. Streetman and Vodafone Partners are two very well-known examples that we have in about 15 countries in Europe. And I will explain here what exactly changed and why we still have a problem with those open Class-Based generating offers. To leave. The Internet works, you have nice people, you have a customer that gives money for access to easy. And the customer dreams of a service that she or she wants to use in this case, it is a bit of a decentralized podcast hosting service, which is really popular in Germany. And so. This service allows podcast producers to reach a really wide audience without having to pay any hosting fee, which is really cool. So there's the service love that also pays for access. And then you have the clout interconnection part where those two ISPs exchange data and everyone is happy. The classic model of net neutrality violation would be that the ISP wants to get money from the content and application provider from Bitola, so suddenly not a money flow that gives preferential treatment either prioritized in a technical way, your data is faster or your data is cheaper becaus
e I don't deducted from the arbitrary volume gap did I enforce on my users? And what you get here is basically a two sided market so the ISP can open up its hands from both sides and get money. This is a really old concept in telephony, you know, and when you when I make a call with you, then my operator pays your operator because he terminates the call. It's called calling party network PAICE. That's the way telecommunication companies have made most of their money for decades. And now we have this old model, more or less forced into the Internet and to, for example, call it sending party network. Paice So again, I am Deutsche Telekom. I am Vodafone. I have a huge customer base. I want to get money from both sides, both from the users that I'm offering access service and from the application providers that want to reach these customers. I'm in control. I have to access Monopoly on both sides. That's the old model. And the new model is different products like these that are old model after binge on program of T-Mobile US have been really widespread in Europe and we now also have other companies like INDs in Austria and Telia did all follow the same approach. And the new model is different. Suddenly, you're no longer just by axis, you get YouTube or Netflix or ZF mediatheque, and are you pay for these particular services to be 088 or they're just given for free? It doesn't matter in that model. It's just a minor detail. The really important thing here is those ISPs have competitors, hopefully, and they have suddenly the customer has to decide which service do I want to I want this type of access of that type of access or which services do I get? Certainly the product matrix gets really complicated. Suddenly, using a new cool service is no longer a question of just signing up on their website, but changing the access product that you have, certainly internet is no longer a universal block that connects you to a whole globe and all of the innovative capacity that will 
be invented tomorrow. Now, you have a subscription that is with your telecommunications company, usually has a period of two years before you can end the contract in most countries. And you have a shift here in the way how agile users can vote with their feet. And that, of course, makes it more complicated for users. But real big problem is when you reintroduce the application provider, let's take Bittle off again with loved ones to also be 088, let's say. And so they would have to also be part of the stream on or Vodafone Pass program, which means they have to enter into a contract in that country in that language. They have to continuously cooperate with the telecom company to have their data accelerated, that means to have it identifiable by that operator, which is quite tricky to do in most cases. And you have to give them 30 days notice before Vodafone phone parcel, four weeks or streetman before you make a change on your own service, which is quite a drastic interference on the innovative capacity of any company. And this is just, you know, and finally, you could be held liable for any wrongfully billed data volume, which means as a small company or in this case, as better off as a community project. You face a lot of potential costs if you make a mistake. And it's just one 018 program. There is another one in Germany. There are around 25 mobile operators in Germany alone, 25 contracts that you have to keep up with, 25 people you have to notify every time you make a change on your own service. In Europe, it would be roughly 3000 mobile operators that you would have to enter into contracts with. Almost no company can do that, um, at least not, as Sammy said, we are talking about in the digital single market. And then what would happen is that you only choose the biggest ISPs with the hugest user base to make deals with them and just forget the smaller ones. And there we have the mafia effect. You know, those that already have accumulated a lot of market capital
 will have a much more easier to reinforce their market position. But then, of course, if you are really a big kid on a playground like Netflix, you can just make one deal. And then you accelerated in all of Europe. But love can do that. And there is another problem. Why this will not work with Pitler? Because Spitler is a decentralized podcast hosting service. It uses BitTorrent as an underlying technology. It does not have centralized servers that it can rely on for distributing its content. And these types of models only work with centralized services. So you need to have a heart ID marker and you cannot rely on any network. You know, most of the things like the block chain would not be possible to be 088. Many new technologies that don't have centralized hierarchies cannot be part of this type of the Internet. So we see a drastic change and we lose a lot of the innovative capacity and we might never see services which are possible in the Internet we have right now. And on a final note, there's a huge privacy problem that I would like to mention. In order to be a service that exhilarated you can you have to be identifiable for the network operator so you can rely on IP addresses to get a report numbers. But in most cases, you have your House or Senate server name ID certificates. Those two things are most widely used in order to identify a service. But that means, you know, the Internet is structured in layers. Deep packet inspection is in the red area that's off hands off limits for an speed, they should not look deep into the packages in the layers to top three layers. And this is also prohibited by the European net neutrality regulations. And we are speaking about criteria which are really high on the list. Jarrell's Layer seven application layer. And now comes the tricky part. You have a bill from a telecom company every month that you have to date a volume that you've used. You know, from telephony that if they wrongfully pilley billu for a call that you hav
e not made, you have the right to dispute dispell. They have to store the data. They have to do data retention in order to be able to have this dispute resolution done. Now, suddenly, your URLs become a the same thing as the callers that the calls that you've made with your telephone. So this could be data retention through the back door. And there is not just a whole net neutrality aspect that we have to talk about. Having this level of deep down control in every Internet contract also means at the end that you might need you might need to legally be obliged as an ISP to store every URL that a user has accessed and amount of data that was transferred at least to that house. And this is not unthinkable. Like in Denmark, they have data retention, which is on a national basis. It's actually quite close to this already. So in here, the interests of the telecom industry and of governments that want to surveil their citizens actually online quite neatly. And I think this is a ticking time bomb about the whole net neutrality and generating debate. And I wanted to bring that to your attention. Finally, we have workshop later today at six p.m. at lecture hall three, if you want to get active in your own country and help us make enforcement of net neutrality, if you are a customer of Streetman or Vodafone pals or any other net neutrality violating offer, come to us and we might actually have some collaboration that we can do. And and yeah, in general, we need more people. We are hiring and we also have many volunteer possibilities. If you are a Pyfrom Jaguar developer, we always need telecom lawyers from all EU member countries or economists and designers, web developers, companies and particularly leaker's from telecom companies to negative points. And of course, regulatory authorities are always welcome. Thank you very much. Thank you, Thomas. We have time for one question. So microphone number four, please. Yes, uh, maybe we can both agree that the Internet has grown as l
arge, good as it is, due to the overall lack of government regulation. Historically speaking. Why do you think now is the correct time to introduce a very far reaching, detailed government regulation of the Internet? Isn't there a potential this will backfire? I mean, you're talking about government bureaucrats inspecting people throughout the configurations. Basically, Republicans have made exactly the same point in the recent interview that I'm not a Republican. I believe you. But the problem is the Internet was born neutral. And to quote Lawrence Lessig, we are more or less just protecting the original way the Internet was built. And yes, we need laws and some type of government regulation in order to enforce it. But I just see no other way to market forces would inherently drive telecom companies to more profit and more control over the users. And we have to keep the Internet open. And in a democracy, laws are the only way that we have in order to give limits to the market. And also, a free market economy relies on a certain framework within which to market can happen. And without this framework, I think we have to capitalism and definitely no free and open Internet. So, again, another round of applause for Thomas.