THE STATE OF THE EUROPEAN UNION

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THE STATE OF THE EUROPEAN UNION
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charges, so that consumers would be charged
the same tariffs wherever their location. A dead-
line of 30 June 2016 was established for opera-
tors to reach agreement and reflect this in their
tariffs.
After its passage through the European
Parliament, this point was also amended, but
the final goal has been maintained, setting 15th
November 2015 as the deadline for roaming
suppliers not to apply “any surcharge in com-
parison to the charges for mobile communica-
tions services at domestic level on roaming cus-
tomers in any Member States for any regulated
roaming call made or received, for any regulated
roaming SMS/MMS message sent and for any
regulated data roaming services used, nor any gen-
eral charge to enable the terminal equipment or
service to be used abroad”.
These measures have been heavily criticized
by telecommunications operators because, ac-
cording to them, the total elimination of roam-
ing would mean that domestic customers would
subsidize the extra cost of providing roaming
charges through standard tariffs.
Net Neutrality
The Regulation proposed by the Commission
also addresses the issue of net neutrality and
the possible management of traffic by opera-
tors. This regulation differentiates between two
types of services: internet access services and
managed services. The Regulation thus permits
the appearance of a new kind of service with
characteristics that differ from internet access
services. At the same time, it protects internet
services against these new managed services, as
long as “the provision of specialised services
shall not impair in a recurring or continuous
manner the general quality of internet access
services”.
In addition, the suppliers of these services
are obliged to inform their customers of any
traffic management technique used on their
networks, and of any other kind of procedure
that could alter the quality of the service or the
security of their personal data.
The Parliament, in turn, has maintained the
distinction introduced by the Commission be-
tween internet access services and managed
services that operators may offer. These special-
ized services can only be offered “if the network
capacity is sufficient to provide them in addition
to internet access services and they are not to
the detriment of the availability or quality of in-
ternet access services”.
Despite the fact that both proposals of regu-
lation distinguish between the two services – in-
ternet access services and specialized services –
these definitions have been widely criticized by
many stakeholders because they do not make
their scope clear. Neither of the two regulations
describes the procedures for analysing whether
the availability or quality of internet access ser-
vices has been impaired or what would consti-
tute a substantial deterioration. Instead, they
limit themselves to defining concepts which, in
the absence of specific technical details regard-
ing their application, may be implemented with
a greater or lesser degree of rigour. This lack of
precision is particularly important in this area
because it relates to services that depend upon
the use of shared physical resources to reach
users.
At the same time, on 20th November 2014
the Council discussed a draft7 on the problem of
net neutrality, and organized further meetings
on this topic in January 2015. This report sets
out general guidelines on the basic principles,
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