Preliminary findings that European telcos are blocking and throttling Internet...

European Regulators in Electronic Communications that said fixed and mobile operators are using a wide range of Internet traffic management practices and an equally broad variety of implementation methods and policy justifications for them. BEREC is compiling data for the European Commission on the extent to which net neutrality exists in Europe. The most frequently reported traffic management activities were blocking and/or throttling of peer-to-peer traffic on fixed and mobile networks, and blocking of VoIP traffic, mostly on mobile networks, it said. When blocking or throttling exists, it’s usually done via deep-packet inspection, it said. Around a quarter of the 400 operators who responded to BEREC justify their practices based on “what could be described as ’security and integrity’ concerns” such as fighting spam, though some of those measures are best described as congestion-management techniques, it said. Regarding congestion management, some providers use “application-agnostic” approaches such as active buffering, while others use “application specific” techniques to slow specific traffic such as video streaming, it said. Around one third of the fixed operators manage their networks in order to offer specialized services such as telephony or TV along with a public and best-efforts Internet access service, it said. This is the first time European regulators have tried to identify emerging trends in traffic management, it said. It’s now validating and categorizing the data and plans to publish its findings in Q2, BEREC said. The overview will feed into other BEREC work on net neutrality, it said. The widespread practices prove that Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes’ “laissez faire” stance on net neutrality is allowing operators to violate users’ freedoms, La Quadrature said.