Thursday, May 10, 2012

Dutch Lawmakers Pass Net-Neutrality Bill

Feinberg, Andrew. "Dutch Lawmakers Pass Net-Neutrality Bill." The Hill Blog, May 9, 2012.
From the blog: "The Netherlands on Tuesday became the second country in the world to pass network neutrality into law, as the upper house of the Dutch parliament approved a bill implementing the policy and granting Internet users new privacy protections.The law is designed to prevent Internet service providers (ISPs) from discriminating between similar websites or content providers, forcing them to treat all data equally.The passage of the bill was announced by Bits of Freedom, a Dutch digital-rights group that has lobbied strongly for the legislation. Network management techniques that most ISPs use are still allowed, but only to improve user experiences or to legitimately bolster Internet security. The Dutch law also goes further by adding tough new anti-wiretapping provisions, specifically a ban on the use of any sort of deep packet inspection (DPI) technology by governments or private companies."