BEREC launches Net Neutrality Guidelines

The Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC) has today published its Guidelines to National Regulatory Authorities (NRAs) on the implementation of the new net neutrality. BEREC’s mandate to produce the Guidelines stems from the Telecoms Single Market Regulation on open internet access.

The Guidelines provide guidance for NRAs to take into account when implementing the rules and assessing specific cases. After meetings with European-level stakeholders in December 2015 and a workshop with high-level academic, legal and technical experts in February 2016, BEREC launched a six-week public consultation on the draft Guidelines, closing at 14:00 CET on 18 July. The number of 481,547 contributions received before the deadline was unprecedented for a BEREC consultation, and coming from diverse categories of respondents: civil society, public institutions and independent experts, ISPs, content and application providers and other industry stakeholders. The BEREC Office has processed the contributions received, and BEREC has conducted a thorough evaluation of the contributions, updating about a quarter of the paragraphs in the final Guidelines.

The Guidelines are published together with an accompanying consultation report summarising stakeholders’ views submitted and how they have been taken into account. Given the high volume of contributions the consultation report had to focus on a summary of the main topics and comments put forward. All non-confidential responses will be published separately by 30 September.

The press debriefing was web-streamed and the audience of the stream also could interact with speakers by sending their questions to email or Twitter #BERECNN and #BERECpublic. In total there were 5206 connections to the web-stream.

BEREC Chair presentation during the press debriefing
Launch of the BEREC Net Neutrality Guidelines (video)

All you need to know about Net Neutrality rules in the EU