[38c3, Hamburg/Internet] Net Neutrality: Why It Still Matters (More Than Ever!)

Net Neutrality is a core pillar of the open internet. But we witness a coordinated, world-wide attack from the telecom industry on the very foundation that ties the internet together. The interconnection of autonomous parts of the internet used to be a non-political and non-commercial field that not many paid attention to. But through heavy lobbying activity we are on the brink of regulating interconnection in the EU, Brazil and India to establish a new payment obligation that would force everyone who wants to send a significant amount of data to customers. Telecom companies would end up being paid twice for the same traffic, from their customers and the content and cloud providers that want to reach them.

This talk by Raquel Renno Nunes from Article 19 and Thomas Lohninger from epicenter.works gives insights into the global civil society fight against the telecom industry. We will lift the veil about the lobbying of companies like Deutsche Telekom, Orange and A1 and showcase strategies how NGOs fought back in Latin America and Europe. This war for the open internet is only heating up. European Commissioner Henna Virkkunen for Digital will have in her hands to uphold net neutrality in Europe.

We want to extend our perspective by also looking at the successful fight in Latin America. Brazil in particular made their own experience with Zero-Rating tariffs that connected millions of Brazilians only to a selected few Apps instead of the whole internet. We will showcase how WhatsApp became a catalyst for the spread of fake news around the election of Jair Bolsonaro.