European parliament approves net neutrality bill

The European Parliament approved a net neutrality bill on Tuesday, but voted down amendments that critics said would close loopholes that weakened the law.

The body approved a bill enshrining net neutrality — the idea that all traffic on the Internet should be treated in the same way — in law across the European Union’s 28 member states, The Wall Street Journal reported.

{mosads}Like similar rules in the U.S., it is designed to stop Internet service providers from blocking or slowing certain types of traffic. But advocates and companies that are critical of the legislation say it is also rife with exemptions that telecom firms could exploit to get around the regulations.

One would allow “specialized services” access to “fast lanes,” or pay for faster delivery of their content. The bill’s authors say it’s intended to support fields like robotic surgery, which require consistent and fast Internet connections. Critics of the bill say that companies who shouldn’t get access to the fast lanes would be able to use the exemption to do so.

They also say the bill doesn’t do enough to protect against zero rating, a practice where service providers allow users to access certain apps without paying, and allows providers to arbitrarily slow down other traffic.

A group of amendments that activists said would patch the loopholes failed to get approval from the parliament.

On Monday, a group of companies and advocacy groups penned a letter arguing that the U.S. regulations, which were approved by the Federal Communications Commission in February, presented a better model for European legislators.

Those rules have been hailed by open Internet advocates but panned by conservatives who say they constitute a regulatory power grab. A legal challenge to the rules will likely be argued later this year.

The European rules will now go into effect in member states. A central regulatory body will also eventually issue guidance for state-level regulators.