We have a lot of meetings, sessions and hearings here inside of the European Parliament. Yesterday, European People's Party organized an event dedicated to the current state of a common market of telecommunications services - called Telecom single market.

The hearing had a form of four consecutive panels about these topics: Roaming, Net neutrality, Rights of the end users and (radiofrequency) Spectrum. Despite the fact, that roaming costs are right now seen as one of the major issues in European digital single market debate, I would like to focus here on the Net neutrality session.

All of the three speakers discussing this issue (Thomas Grob, Kirsten Fiedler and Frode Sørensen) supported the idea of net neutrality, as the idea itself is pretty much not a matter of concern. But how net neutrality or non-neutrality is seen and defined, that can be disputable. At least during this debate it was so.

I would like to mention here some of the interesting points of each one of these three speakers. 

One of the interesting points of Mr. Grob was the comparison made between Specialized Services and Internet stores. Both online stores and Specialized services are regulated by a simple company. If you have your application rejected from the Internet store that is owned by a private company, it should be only logical that only companies that can afford this can have their apps available as "Specialized services". Well... no. Do we really want to have infrastructure that is supposed to serve all of us to become a simple public business? Or what if it will turn to something else... How will our freedom of speech look like when a simple internet user won't be able to reach everyone, as he currently can?

Kirsten Fiedler from EDRI described the current state of Internet as digital single market par excellance - it is united, it is simple, it is available for everyone. Just in the way like we want to have it, just in the way that it is supposed to be. Just in the way that European Union want to build the common market. EU spent decades on its creation and promotion. Thanks to the spread of Internet and the revolution it triggered in our lives, we could see that the goal of single and common market was on some level already achieved in much shorter time than everyone might expect. But by allowing Specialized services to overtake a significant portion of Internet traffic, we will pretty much allow destruction, spinning the wheel of progress backwards by decades. Clearly, that separated markets can experience less competition and therefore it would be easier for the strong to get dominant position. Most of the subjects that do have prevailing positions in some of the markets are already the biggest advocates of the proliferation of Specialized Services.

Another concept that I wanted to mention is how Internet traffic congestion and management are being delt by various sides of the debate. Mr. Sørenson from BEREC spoke about this several times during the whole 3 hours long session. One of the major argument of phone companies (in eurojargon: telecoms) is based on fact that some of the services need more traffic than others. Therefore, an user that only read web pages or lets say write blogposts can be negatively influenced by other Internet users, who watch online television or consume a lot of data in any other way. A sophisticated method how to control Internet traffic thus should be established. But as BEREC pointed out - the IP protocol itself is designed in a fashion that it can handle congestions and redistribute the data flow. Therefore, every bottleneck can be successfully avoided. All of the networks now already have their own management - where all the pathways are effectively measured and the fastest one chosen only. That is why - as BEREC said - shoud providers use this argument at all for supporting of their statement.