The following are the outputs of the real-time captioning taken during the Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Paris, France, from 12 to 14 November 2018. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the event, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> So good morning, everyone. I'm Vincent Toubiana I work at ARCEP. I have the honor and privilege to moderate this session. Thank you for joining us for this early session on Net Neutrality and beyond.
So this session will be split in to two parts. During the first part we'll discuss Net Neutrality going to the details of regulations, and the second part we will discuss what is beyond Net Neutrality. When I say we, I don't mean we around this table. I mean we in this room but also online. So my colleague Ellen will have an eye on online queue. So do not hesitate to use WebEx to participate when you are online.
And this is a birth of a feeder session because we want to have opinions from people not only around this table, but really in this room. And so please get ready to share your thoughts on Net Neutrality and beyond. But first to give you food for thought we will start in other countries and will give a broader view as they share their thoughts.
But first thing, to be on the same page of what we mean by Net Neutrality here are some definition on the next slide. Thank you. So we have the usual Wikipedia definite fligs that they treat autopsy data on Pt Internet equally and do not discriminate and charge differently. And we have more difficult definitions that we found on the Internet and which says that all data packets born and remain free and equal in rights.
And finally we have the definition from John Oliver which is a bit more funny but quite interesting Net Neutrality is not about speed. Principles at ISP should not be able to engage in any practice that manipulates and it helps ensure a level playing field. I shall say that it is not really use the word practice. I use the word a little bit more offensive but the definition is quite good. It is about higher speed and being able to influence your choice online and that's how it is related to online freedom of choice which is also in the title of this session.
And also captures quite well the fact that Net Neutrality is necessary to have a level playing field. So I think I have said enough. I leave the floor to the speakers. So our first speaker is Anais Le Gouguec who is head of economic technology and foresight at ARCEP and happens to be my boss. The floor is yours.
>> ANAIS LE GOUGUEC: Thank you very much. I work at ARCEP and we are the body in charge of implementation of the Net Neutrality provisions in France. So the European version of the Net Neutrality that is defooined by the regulation 2015‑2021 is has the practices for end users to access and distribution information and content and to use and provide application and services the other Internet access services. So it protects from interference that could come from ISPs and so it means no slowing down or blocking or prioritizing traffic, either technically or through very different pricing of the different content that you can access to. It is related to end user's rights and we mean both consumers but also content and application providers. So which means businesses.
So I believe personally that the regulation is working very well but maybe we will have conflicting views on that. And as a common European citizen myself I considered that this regulation is one of these striking examples showing off how rights are protected in the union, at least compared to some other parts of the world but we will see in Canada and India also we are very well treated regarding this kind of issues.
The thing that I'm going to develop elaborate a little bit upon is the question of will it last. Is this regulation really future proof because technology can evolve quite rapidly in this field and there is a question of whether the regulation might become obsolete in the future or not. I believe not and that's notably because a regulation allows enough flexibility for regulatory bodies to do that job. The regulation gives general principles and it gives us the spirit of the law and it provides us with a toolbox which we can easily adapt to the different situations that that we can encounter. For example, there are several notions that we can ‑‑ that we can use. We have the concept of reasonable traffic management, we don't have a lot of known examples as of now ‑‑ as of reasonable traffic management cases but maybe that will change with 5G. And I think this is a very good example of why I believe the regulation can be future proof because the regulation ‑‑ the regulation can face questions like network slicing in the 5G environment since it gives the ability to define general guidance for ‑‑ that ISPs have to follow to comply with their regulation. But I don't want to ‑‑ there is ‑‑ the next session is going to be more detailed on the question of the articulation between 5G and Net Neutrality. So it is called Net Neutrality versus 5G and technological challenges. It is in the same room. Services that use the same pipe as the Internet but those are not substitute to Internet access services of the TV services that can be provided to you by your ISP. You also have the voice services that are provided by your Telco operators. And finally ISPs also have the possibility to offer different ‑‑ to have offers that are differentiated in terms of general speed and also in terms of data gaps that in the different commercial offer that can provide to consumers. So overall with all those kind of flexibility ARCEP and European counterpart we have the possibility to design a compliance regime that can be adapted to different situations.
Secondly, I would say ‑‑ something is also quite important in the European framework of the regulation is that we have created a very good framework of cooperation between the different NRAs across Europe andly explain a little bit further why this is really pivotal. First, baraks. It is the body that regroups all the national regulation agencies. So the NRAs of all across Europe. And they issued Guidelines in 2016 right after the regulation was approved. And those Guidelines are very much still the key ‑‑ it is a tutorial basically for NRAs to apply the regulation. They are quite comprehensive but still there was public consultation that was organized to check if there was any need for review those Guidelines and next year those Guidelines are going to be updated accordingly and those Guidelines were the result of a concerted effort by NRAs to make sure they have a common understanding how concretely you apply the Net Neutrality regulation.
There is also ‑‑ there was also an expert Working Group that was created within Barack dedicated to that issue. I am not involved in it. I can congratulate them on their very good work and informal rule is any national case is discussed within this group. This helps NRAs to build knowledge using each other's experience and brainstorm on those new cases and also to provide better analysis with we encounter new situations.
And finally there is also another informal rule which is the involvement of the NRAs heads. We have up to four Plenary meetings per year. And every time we have ‑‑ we have heads of NRA that take the floor and present their national case or cases and then all NRAs can have a discussion about what is at stake with that case, how it could be handled, et cetera. This barak to make sure it provides consist ePt solution. This is very important in general because we are in the framework of having a digital single market all across Europe but also even more so important because sometimes we have big ISP that propose the same kind of offers all across several countries in Europe. So it is better to have a consistent ‑‑ to have consistency on those cases.
And finally, there is a last case of gam Pell of NRAs and Baarka that pertains to development tools. They have launched a tool of quality of service at Net Neutrality infringement. The idea is to have a common tool for every NRA to design its own version of the tool to measure if there is it any infringement of the Net Neutrality regulation. So this software is currently being developed and it should be available next year.
And also in the context of those exchanges, for example, at ARCEP we had the idea of implementing mandatory APAs to be ‑‑ to be included in the set top boxes of ISPs. And this would, for example, allow to have more precise information, for example, on the ‑‑ on the specific situation of the connection. For example, if the person is using a WiFi connection, if it is using ‑‑ if it is on fiber, et cetera,. This helps to feed after the measurement tool with data that is clean. Because it is actually also ‑‑ so not only do the WiFi connection but also the type of device that you are using, it can influence the speed of your connection. So feed the measurement tools with very clean data that's also something that can help a lot.
And so we propose ‑‑ presented this idea within Baraks expert Working Group and maybe this can inspire other NRAs to do the same kind of things. So today not only do the Guidelines but also the practice of barka is highly coordinated and this is a fundamental asset of Barak and the success of relies on the long run.
>> VINCENT TOUBIANA: Next is Philippe Tousignant.
>> PHILIPPE TOUSIGNANT: Thank you. So the 30C is a perhaps a bit of an introduction. It is an independent regulator. (CRTC) so I do not speak on behalf of the Government of Canada but I can speak for the CRTC and say we have a strong commitment towards Net Neutrality and this has been echoed across the country and we believe that a free and open Internet gives everyone a fair chance to innovate. And allows citizens to be informed and engaged on issues of public concern without ‑‑ we believe na Internet service providers and carriers should be offering for data at lower prices. That way subscribers can choose what content they want to consume. The Net Neutrality approach in our jurisdiction is based on two authorities in the legislation that we are responsible to administer and the telecom Act in particular.
So the first section the words Net Neutrality or the words Internet are not in the legislation. But Net Neutrality regimes fall under the authority of no carrier should provide services undue preference or unjust discrimination. That includes themselves. So it is a principle based approach that is neutral in technology that all the carriers have to abide by.
And the second authority provision that we have Telecommunications Act that prevents regulators from interfering with the content. So the framework was built in response to the evolution of the market. And in clear CRTC tradition it was responsive to issues brought forward by either the Internet Association of ‑‑ Internet Association with regards to Internet traffic management practices or actual consumers with regards to the differential pricing practices or rating practices.
So I'm going to get in to the details of these two in a second. But just a few words on ITMP and DPP before I go in to detail of these two things. So for Internet management practices that is our oldest framework. It dates back to 2009. Yes. And it basically it limits Internet management practices to very limited circumstances that are legitimate. And it creates a framework whereby the carriers cannot use Internet management to tunnel traffic, except for a limited way and it would be, for example, to address a security issue or a network congestion issue. And the commission's position has been that way back in 2009 in order to manage traffic ISPs should invest in capacity. And that should be their primary focus as opposed to manage traffic that goes to consumers and/or to other providers that are resellers.
So the differential pricing framework was studied by the commission recently in the past two or three years and it had to do with some market offers that were appearing where major players Bell, was offering its own TV services at a discounted price, discounted data plan and other similar offers. Very few in the market. But the commission was quite extensive in reviewing this ‑‑ the appearance of these offers in the market and found them to be ‑‑ it‑to‑have a negative impact on competition, that they would stifen innovation and they would not foster consumer choice in the long term. And they would not affect affordability of services in a significant matter. So therefore the ‑‑ they have established some very fairly stringent criteria to see what would be an acceptable differential pricing and they are almost currently not in the market. Next slide, please.
So in its Internet traffic management practices the commission is to add or establish a number of criterias by which it assesses an ITMP is acceptable or not. And this is ‑‑ they are. Transparency, the information has to be published and clear to consumers and/or to alternate providers and it should foster innovation and the default there is we prefer to investment in an infrastructure than using IMTPs. And in the same venue they should be designed to address a very specific need and not be a broad instrument by which manages traffic. And it should be competitively neutral. And ‑‑ so just mindful of time here. Should be competitive and neutral as well.
So given the time I am going to go rather quickly on differential pricing practices. So you may know, but just for clarity that they are ‑‑ the main ones we have seen in Canada are the ones where a provider would offer a service. We have data caps in Canada. So if you ‑‑ if ‑‑ usage is counted and if you go above the limit of your data cap, then you start ‑‑ you either incur overarc or you can buy another data pack. If you use a service, then it doesn't count towards your data cap. So the commission has a rule that none of these services were acceptable. And that particularly from ‑‑ we have established four criteria. So maybe we will get later in to the conversation about these but the criteria that the commission gives preponderance, is the concept of data agnostic. If a practice and treats certain origin data differently than another type of data then the threshold for it to be acceptable is extremely high.
So I think that will be my four minutes. Thank you.
>> VINCENT TOUBIANA: Thank you. Our next speaker is Sunil Bajpai principal advisor with regulatory authority of India and will discuss monitoring and enforcement of the Net Neutrality regulation.
>> SUNIL BAJPAI: Good afternoon Ladies and Gentlemen. Can I have the first slide, please? First slide. So this is ‑‑ this slide sums up pretty much what I would say in both the parts together. That stating the principle, laying down the principle of Net Neutrality will not be enough. And that monitoring, and enforcement and interpretation and several other things would be necessary and which is what would finally define Net Neutrality for us.
So Ms. Anais Le Gouguec in her opening remarks said she they are working well but asked a question will it last. It will last depending on what we do with the second sentence which I have on my slide, and it will require doing and we will deal with it in the second part of the event today.
For now I want to share with you what we have very briefly what we have done in India and what the state of this Net Neutrality regulation is. So next slide, please. Thank you. The context is different in different countries. The legal context is different. The context in other ways is different. For instance, CRTC mentioned that lowering prices is important. It is one of the objectives. In India the prices are already very low. They are a 30th of the $2 poverty line that is defined globally. So it is a 30th of that. So how much lower could possibly this go? And this is when we for mobile devices we are the No. 1 country in the world for data consumption in gigabytes. So it is very cheap and very large.
And it seems paradoxal and that's how it is. That's why I said the context is different in different countries. The legal context is different. I will take a few more moments to explain what we have done. We started with the issue of zero rating in 2015 and that was banned. No discrimination on price is allowed in India and that's it. That's the end of the story.
It did cause some issues, for instance, Facebook's free basic could not be launched in India or it had to be withdrawn because it violated this principle. 2017 we came up with the Net Neutrality regulations. They were not regulations. They were more like recommendations to the Government. And the reason is that we have read Net Neutrality in to the license itself. The TSBs the telecom service providers license, Internet service licenses unrestricted access. So we have interpreted that unrestricted access to mean that unrestricted in this manner. And sent recommendations to the Government to explicitly say so in the license and the Government has done it. And therefore, it is driven by license. And the telecom regulatory authority being responsible for ensuring that the license term conditions are met is able to enforce the Net Neutrality. Of course, the provisions are the same, that the other two speakers have talked about. That it allows for some exceptions and some exclusions. And it allows reasonable traffic management and these are issues which are clearly stated but can lead to problems. And then we will talk about that later in the second presentation that I will be making.
So where are we now? We are in the process of doing two more things. Bullet 4 and 5 on this slide. The regulations on transparency and disclosure are being framed. This is the way you have to define the term in the license and after that we will come up with the regulations, how this transparency and how those disclosures are to be given. And also we recommended a multi‑stakeholder body that will govern the Net Neutrality. It will have stakeholders from all the sectors and will govern itself. Because that's a big issue. You cannot simply lay down the rules and then who is to find out all the violations and make decisions and further things. We are in the process of laying down the methods and procedures. So this is where I would like to stop for the moment. And this is pretty much a summary of what we have done in India and this I would say consistent with what we have heard so far over here. Thank you very much.
>> VINCENT TOUBIANA: Thank you. So our next speaker is Amba Kak who is the policy advisor at Mozilla.
>> AMBA KAK: Thank you. Some time last year when the new cycle was consumed with the proposed appeal of Net Neutrality in the U.S. you had a lot of headlines announce was this it the end of Net Neutrality and I think what is very clear at this panel itself I think is the best evidence that that is not just very far from the truth but perhaps today the global commitment and consensus on Net Neutrality is stronger than ever and we have seen this across the continents on this panel itself. Where do we see clear consensus and also zoom in I suppose a little bit at national context and see where there might be lessons there and I am going to try do this all in the next four minutes. So the first thing I want to talk about where are there similarities. Mr. Sunil Bajpai has indicated some of these areas but I would say in the critical definitions of reasonable traffic management and on the way in which specialized services are being understood and the narrow tailoring of definition we do see consensus and I speak specifically to that between the Indian regulation and the telecom single market in Europe and I think even on ‑‑ I mean Mr. Sunil Bajpai spoke about cooperation and enforcement and there is a memorandum understanding. But think one of the other issues apart from just the tools is also transparency and complaint procedures. So I think apart from making sure that there is some kind of best practices on how to get users engaged with Net Neutrality enforcement what should the disclosure forms say because we have consensus on the rules that opens up the possibility to actually truly cooperate on the enforcement methods and indeed on the complaint mechanisms as well. Thirdly I would say prova kative that we hear lot about the global impact of GDP and privacy regulation in Europe and we have seen several countries globally move forward GDPR like or GDPR light regulation. But I think we could start making a similar argument for net neutrality as well. There are parts of the world, many parts of the world that have chosen a strong commitment in Net Neutrality and placing themselves and giving themselves some kind of competitive edge. They have made a commitment to a certain kind of Digital Economy and I think that's something which the argument in fact, should be made that it does give these countries that competitive edge as a result of that. And so like I said I want to also move a little bit away from the global narrative. So I am going to speak to India because that's the context I know best and where two interesting lessons. So the first one is just to give you some context at the time when the question emerged in India that Mr. Sunil Bajpai spoke about which is should free basics be allowed. Should similar zero rating be allowed. This was the biggest push back was that Internet connectivity in India was still less than 30% of the population. And so connectivity should take precedence over Net Neutrality. Some access was better than none. But it took both a highly successful public campaign and a commitment from the regulator to push back against that logic. And to argue that not all connectivity solutions would be encouraged and some would be preferred versus others.
And I think more importantly it was a lesson for other Developing Countries that are looking at these issues that Net Neutrality and other rights‑based issues would not be an afterthought to connectivity. They have to be part of the same conversation. So I think this is important just from the perspective that I do think that what has happened in India will give regulators in Developing Countries in particular the confidence and comfort to take these positions. Indeed we had startups and other actually private sector Actors in India also support Net Neutrality on the argument that the digital sector in India was still quite nasient. Ensure that we had Indian companies could also do well. Part of the vision of the development of the digital India our Government was committed to. So I think I will stop there and hand it to Thomas.
>> VINCENT TOUBIANA: Thank you. Our next speaker is Thomas Lohninger executive director of AP center work and also a fellow of Mozilla and Stanford center of Internet and society and he will discuss about 5G a bit. So as it is a topic of the next session, I think it will be a good teaser for the next session. But please don't be a spoiler.
>> THOMAS LOHNINGER: Thank you. The overall theme is what I call a new danger to the global Internet. The kind of segmentation that we are witnessing these days and it comes in two ways. First the one that we are already witnessing and that's the proliferation of differential prices and practices. That means 0 rating but also specific data volumes. And mostly speaking from the area of my work which is the European Union where we have similar rules recently repealed FCC open Internet rules and we also have a new cable in them in a way that if a 0 rating offer is class based if it is not just individual applications but classes of applications, it is easier for those offers to pass.
But it is in no way to say this is the only offers that we see in the European market. We a great variety of these commercial practices. And what I would argue is that it is a blind spot so far for most regulators when it comes to for a case‑by‑case basis. Canada has decided against such an offer on a case‑by‑case basis and that's why I would like to look closer as these offers and would ask for the next slide. In which you see an economic analysis which we have conducted on the correlation between the existence of such differential pricing offers and the price of mobile data volume in these markets. And you see a general trend of 10% decrease in prices, when there is no 0 rating, a 2% increase in prices when there is 0 rating and even when 0 rating is excluded out of the market. So 12% difference overall and I think that such a pan European or global analysis on the impact of these commercial practices would prove to be very interesting for all parties involved, particularly all the application providers which are also offering and form the consequences of these offers when it comes to their competitiveness. And some NRAs have expressed to us the interest to pick up this analysis and continue this work. We used a dataset for a small NGO like ours. Please go to the next slide. And here you see a complete mapping that we have conducted of all 0 rating offers in the European economic area. And this is just a preliminary result which shows you the top 20, 0 rated apps in the EU and you see that 15 of those are from the U.S.
So again there is a strong bias and the only real European offers are music streaming service where, of course, copyright law plays an essential role in the provisioning of such services. And we will release the full dataset of all 0 rating offers early 2019 accompanied by a report on the analysis of Net Neutrality enforcement in the EU.
I mentioned two elements to this new danger of the segmentation of the Internet. First one was 0 rating. Next one is upcoming 5G and network slices. Network slices are quality of service on the radio access layer. It is not new. It has been around as an optional part of the LTE standard before but it is part of a strong push of telecom industry to make it appear as if 5G could only create a benefit for society if we water down Net Neutrality roles and I would argue the contrary is true.
First and foremost 5G can be completely compatible with a Net Neutrality frame work and it allows other access products, certain forms, to be provisioned and the business models is important and yet to be answered by the industry on what are the concrete models of provisioning of these services, when it comes to vertical integration particularly. And from the understanding that I have based on the data that we can look at, at best implementation of network slicing would be preferential treatment at the expense of everyone else in that network. And at worst it would be a complete segmentation of the Internet along a fine granular level of control around applications or classes of applications. The final slide, please.
And here you see that it is actually an original image that I have stolen from Facebook. Facebook is using that in one their videos. And it is a block that you can plug in to the wall and a Christmas lights up. What Facebook is showing us here is the best explanation of concept very well‑known to to all Europeans in the room, the con sent of specialized services. And very much like the difference between a universal power connector that allows you to connect any device and really has interoperability built in a specialized services is the opposite of it is a vertically integrated product which restricts everyone who wants to buy devices and also buying access using the same access and also if you want to manufacture devices, provision your services you are dependent on this type of integration which in general any law maker or regulator should ask themselves if there is any evidence on such specialized services that they can deliver any value close to the Democratic economic or educational value we have seen from the open Internet and to conclude, contrary to what President Macron said yesterday it has to be our goal to keep the Internet whole, particularly in these times.
>> VINCENT TOUBIANA: Thank you. It is now the time to open the floor to the room. Do you have questions? Yeah.
>> Good morning. I am a Ph.D. student in communications at the University of Strausberg. I will be thankful if you can align enough with some information about the exception and exclusions for the ISPs. This is my first question. My second one to what extent actually the public authorities may have legitimate right to derogate on the Net Neutrality principle. Thanks so much.
>> VINCENT TOUBIANA: This last question is for all the panel?
>> Yeah, it is for all the panel.
>> SUNIL BAJPAI: Let me briefly comment on that. The exceptions and exclusions that actually given in the recommendations that we have given ‑‑ that we have published in detail, for instance, the content delivery networks are not affected by Net Neutrality regulations in India. The operation subject to certain conditions about capacity, et cetera, in the access part, not getting exhausted because of those specialized service, subject to restrictions they are allowed. Any traffic is not excluded. And so in this way some exceptions and exclusions are allowed. If the network is under attack are you to distinguish between that traffic and nornl maltraffic? Would you allow traffic that is malicious to pass through? Certainly not. What it has to do when there is a breakdown or a surge, because of whatever reason, then they ‑‑ then those temporary measures can be taken. And you asked what are the limitations there. So the limitations are that it has it be relevant to where the problem occurred. You have to demonstrate that the measures were proportionate and confined to that area or that time. And things like that. Thank you.
>> ANAIS LE GOUGUEC: Maybe regarding your second question there is an exception also in the European regulation that means that you also have to confirm to any legal decision. If a judge is telling you that you should get the access to a specific ‑‑ to a specific website for ‑‑ on a legal basis, that's also when you can ‑‑ the ISP has to comply to the decision of that's probably one of the main situations where there is legitimate reason not to enforcement in this very specific situation. If any other ones want to ‑‑
>> PHILIPPE TOUSIGNANT: The situation is very similar to what we heard from these two other speakers. Maybe another example would be for 0 rating, it would be a commission has said that because we have a policy I believe it is in the law that you can't charge people for invoicing. Therefore this could be part of a service or a service to a customer that would not be part of the ‑‑ would not count towards the cap. So that would be an exception.
>> AMBA KAK: I wanted to speak to your second question which is on public authorities and whether this is a different treatment for them. So the short answer in India is no and elsewhere as well. What's interesting it was a question when the regulatory debate was happening a few years. Should public interest applications be exempt from the 0 rating band and the arguments that regulator accepted it might impede competitive neutrality. And so eventually it was I think for that reason and for the reason that it might be a slippery slope on how you define public interest and how do you do it narrowly enough that they decided not to create that exemption.
>> VINCENT TOUBIANA: Thank you. Another person on the left.
>> Thank you. I have two questions addressed specifically to Mr. Sunil Bajpai and maybe to other panel speakers. My first question when we speak about Net Neutrality, I understand that the notion we have to assert without taking in to account the technical nature of network. So what we ‑‑ you insis to the 5G network as a specific case or special case. My first question.
My second question, yesterday President Macron said that we have maybe to take initiative to reform between brackets, reform the neutrality concept. And he spoken about Chinese model and Californian model. Maybe you were there. What are your comments, please?
>> THOMAS LOHNINGER: I am not sure if I understakeholdered your first question correctly. I mean Net Neutrality regulations are all drafted in a technology neutral way. And as I mentioned aspect of about network slicing is not a novel concept of 5G completely. So I don't think that we should change the new technology which has agreed in a global standards consortium this should not overrule our existing legislation on these fields. That's my general approach to that question. And secondly the speech of Mr. Macron yesterday definitely had certain parts where I am not completely sure what he tried to say but at least appeared that he was saying we have to make us independent. If that would mean, the fundamental rights of the European Union need to be uphold against froms of California Internet companies or the Chinese surveillance state, I would agree with that. But I think there were also some unclarities between the platform regulation debate which is something on going to my knowledge where nobody has yet proposed really good solutions and Net Neutrality debate where we can move on to enforcement and provision and make sure that Net Neutrality is delivered to people before we mix it up with far more complicated debates.
>> VINCENT TOUBIANA: Yes.
>> I have a question regarding Net Neutrality regulation in Canada and India. The most prominent difference between Net Neutrality regulations in these two countries and in the Europe and also in the rest of the world is the prohibition of the 0 rating. I have two questions in that regard. The first one is about what is the reaction from the consumers. In Europe we often hear the argument from the operators that consumers want to have 0 rating. In your country, it is prohibited. So have you heard arguments from consumers that they don't like this prohibition? That's my first question.
My second question is about the implementation of this prohibition. Have you had any cases or incidents where this has been challenged in any way from the industry? Thanks.
>> SUNIL BAJPAI: So let me take the question first and then we can pass it to Canada. There was a related question which the panelist here had also raised and in his graph he had shown that the prices actually fall when neutral behavior is ‑‑ sorry. When 0 rating is banned. So I want to share some details with you and then I'll answer this specific question that you raised. When the argument of ‑‑ when 0 rating was being discussed in the country and at that time free basics was trying to make an entry, the argument for free was compelling. And it is difficult to say no to something which is free. And the argument was that this free ‑‑ this free access would lead to greater penetration of Internet in the country and it brings in benefits and why should you deny those benefits. At that time India had 100 million or so Internet users and Facebook thought that it could lead the penetration. And that's the argument they sold. But what happened despite 0 rating that India's penetration went to 500 million and Facebook reached only 200 plus million. Who was going to lead what. It is not that straightforward a relationship. Just as he pointed out that even if it is free, the actual cost does get passed on to the consumer and the access becomes more expensive. And that's not surprising to me. Because why would access provider do anything voluntarily to reduce their own ability to charge. They wouldn't want to do that. So if they want to meddle with the access in some way it would to make more money that I think is okay also. But whether it has any other effects is what Net Neutrality is really concerned about. And therefore that has been ‑‑ there has been such a thrust behind it. So I think the people in India have generally taken this very well. And there has been no backlash of any kind against banning of 0 rating. They are quite happy and it is net access is pretty inexpensive in this country. Thank you.
>> PHILIPPE TOUSIGNANT: Thank you for your question. I wouldn't say in Canada there is a general prohibition. The task to implement or to offer a differentially priced service is extremely high. So I will go through the criteria that somebody estimated and you can judge for yourself how high the threshold or the criteria is. So the data ‑‑ the data should be treated equally. So it has to be ‑‑ it would have to be data agnostic or as much data agnostic as possible. Whether ‑‑ if exclusive to a certain segment of consumers it would be looked as not probablying being authorized. We had a situation where a service, a music service was offered to a tier 1 category of customers and not to the other two tiers and the commission found it was exclusive offer that could not allow this differential practice to continue. And also we would look at what are the impacts on the Internet openness and innovation at large. And the commission considers innovation not as an innovation from the part of the carrier considers that differential pricing tools or offers are marketing innovations but not technological innovations and looks at impact on innovation is the open Internet being a plats form of innovation for all new entrants and for everyone. So that's the third criteria and whether or not it would be free or financial compensation involved. The threshold is really high and to our knowledge there are virtually none in the market. So but we did ‑‑ when we established our policy in 2017 we did hear about mostly companies arguing on behalf of consumers that there was a ‑‑ there was an advantage or a financial advantage to consumers where we can provide them with a service at a discounted price or more data because some service does not count to their data cap. But the commission considered that this short term segmented gain did not ‑‑ could not compare with the long term effect of choice and innovation that have an investing in networks that have much more chance or present an opportunity for lowering prices overall and contribute to having affordable high quality services in Canada. On balance of these two arguments the commission chose the longer term and broader objectives prevaled over the short term individual gain.
>> VINCENT TOUBIANA: I think it is time to move to the second part of the session where we will be discussing what is beyond Net Neutrality. So that is to say to ‑‑ how to ensure that Net Neutrality principles are actually respected. If you remember Thomas Lohninger's definition of Net Neutrality the principle is to avoid to prevent ISPs from influencing your choice online. But now there are other stakeholders that can influence choices of users online. When we talk about Internet gatekeepers we no longer only think about ISPs. There is various Actors that plays a role of gatekeeper on the Internet right now. Platforms, device, there are many different types of Actors. So remaining of the ‑‑ for the remaining of the discussion will be surely as a Net Neutrality principle extended to other Actors for the neutrality role to be applicable, so, for example, we will consider other Actors and ISPs and we also consider how ‑‑ what ‑‑ how ISPs can charge users other than with currency and money. So, for example, how data can play a role there. I think yesterday Luca made the link between 0 rating and data at rest. There might be some topic to discuss. Thomas you want to discuss about enforcement complaints and privacy issues?
>> THOMAS LOHNINGER: Yes. Thank you. So I'm going to stick closer to the core issue of Net Neutrality. It is one of the things that I mostly work on. So what goes beyond the principle of Net Neutrality is the enforcement. We have seen the proliferation of the Net Neutrality rules over the years the enforcement part is underdeveloped. And we should accept this as the next challenge and the rules can solve many of the enforcement problems, usually upholds better. When the rules are weak it gets fuzzy and muddy. Generally I think one important thing that I also might ‑‑ my copanelists will talk about is the measurement part. I think enforcement and measurement really have to be seen together.
In the past years we had huge problems with network measurement software because it was not up to date. It was not set for the task to really measure common types of Net Neutrality violations. Blocking. But thankfully we have seen kind of reform of many of these tools and there is now a very good open source landscape when it comes to network measurement. And also regulators more see this as a task. I want to congratulate Barak here because they have commissioned a tool that will be available next year which does more or less everything right. It is based on the ‑‑ on the peer reviewed open methodology and it is open sourced and it creates an open dataset of all the measurement records which is a prerequisite to combine trust by the consumers to believe that the network behavior they are experiencing is what they have paid for. But there is still a lot to go and there is a moving target. Violations will always come in new forms and we have to keep the software up to date. But I think this open data part is particularly helpful to also make the enforcement easier and I would even speak of data driven enforcement because if I'm an operator and I know that any potential unreasonable traffic management practice can then be found months or years later in an open data pool, I might re‑evaluate certain traffic management behavior which I do in times of congestion and it would make it a task of regulators easier. And secondly coming from Civil Society I believe that we should link this measurement with enforcement from the user side together. So every measurement software should have a complaint button. Once I have measured something I can make a screen shot and send to the right address but if we think about it, it would be far easier if I just have an URL of this these particular measurements and I can report it. And particularly to not only talk about traffic management, when we talk about countries without a right land rule on 0 rating we have to invest more in the economic analysis, because an evidence‑based driven approach to enforce many would make life much easier. And to sum all of this up, I think enforcement and transparency are the next step, once we have enshrined neutrality we have the measurement software and we have to think a little bit more in which we want enforcement to happen and I would summarize it with regulation doesn't need to be done it has to be seen to be done which is a call for regulators to be more transparent and more up front in the cases that they work on. We heard that Barak now has in the Plenary groups where they discuss cases that they are thinking. But this is information that is very relevant to the general public and having a more open discussion about it I think would help. To conclude I want to raise it is really going a little bit more beyond area is the privacy implication of the new access models that we see. There are big differences in the restrictions of the world when it comes to privacy, particularly telecommunications metadata and protection. But again these new access models that not only sell you access but also sell you Facebook. They sell you particular applications of those applications are usually identified by the ISP with things like URL, certificates and these are very high level criteria, actually on layer 7 or 5. And suddenly these criteria of day‑to‑day communication practice become billing data. And network operators have to provision such products heavily rely on data and I would argue that consumers are for the most part not aware of the privacy implications of these products and at minimal they should be informed about what this means for their privacy and once this data is processed, who has access to this which might also be a very important question. Thank you.
>> VINCENT TOUBIANA: Thank you Thomas. Next Sunil Bajpai can you share your opinion?
>> SUNIL BAJPAI: Thank you again, Vincent. So I want to make the second part of the argument that I put up at that time. Let me remind you that Net Neutrality concerns the access network but it isn't about access network. It is about innovation with the Internet. It is about promoting and preserving the ability of everyone to innovate and that's good for man kind. And it is to give voice to everyone on the Internet. And those are the reasons that ‑‑ those are the end objectives that we are looking at and not nearly the mechanics of how the data flows in a particular leg.
Surely everybody should be treated equally. That's a given and that all of us agree. But everyone's requirements are not the same. Self‑driving car and a gas meter will not have the same requirements of bandwidth availability or latency. They are different things. And perhaps may need to be treated differently.
To understand this I want to first talk about an argument often given by dump pipes that network is a dump pipe and intelligence lies at the extremes. This is not true. There are no pipes in the network. The pipe is an abstraction and this abstraction fails down once you stretch it beyond a point. So we need to re‑examine this notion of dump pipe and whether that's all that a network does. Let me give you the example of your ‑‑ of our blood vessels. They are pipes. They carry blood from the heart to the tissue but that's also an abstraction and that's a very simplify abstraction. The blood vessels do much more. They do gas exchange and they participate in pumping depend ing on the effort that the human being is making. They carry the enzymes for digesting food. They also carry hormones which affects all the organs and functioning in the body.
Now nature's designs are very, very subtle. And they are integrated. They are not simple tubes. No function can be isolated in your body to a single organ if you think about it. It is distributed everywhere. And why is this so? This is so because nature needs to be very efficient with what it does. If our blood vessels were to be replaced by pipes, they would be dead in no time. It won't work. And we ‑‑ when we demand more from the network, we need to begin thinking differently. And we need to give up this notion.
Network slicing a big bear in the room, 5G is also something that we need to think about. What is it? I like to think of it as cloud computing, that we are all familiar with. You take hardware, you slice it up, you run virtual machines on top. Assign resources to those machines. And they are assigned for specific users based on their SLAs and requirements and capacity needs and that's how it works. Same thing you could think of with the slicing in the network. On a physical network you run virtual networks, multiple networks, one on top ‑‑ all of them on top of that physical network. These networks take resources, physical resources as they need based on SLAs. Maybe user configureable. And deliver what is required.
If you think about it, this slicing which can be done infinitely finally can be sold as bundles which can be reassembled as composite pipes, and you are back to where you started. But there should be no discrimination. Each of the fibers in that pipe are treating traffic differently and there is discrimination. It emerges back in to the system.
Another small point about mobile edge computing, I'm aware that we are running out of time. I'll be brief. So think of it as a restaurant with kitchen and tables and a network in between of waiters that are carrying your dishes from the kitchen. They isolate the kitchen from you. The cook doesn't know where you are sitting, what you are doing, what you ordered. And what the kitchen is doing with the diner need not know. Similarly the network sits between the service providers and the end users and it can perform both these functions. It can present you your face to the service provider and the service providers offerings to you. CDNs does the same thing, cache does the same thing. You locally offer the content without going back to the server. It cannot send your data to the server, if I have a plan that lets me see as many movies. It provides a mediation layer. In case of gaming it can actually recreate the environment at the edge of the network so that network capacity is also optimized and yet the user gets exactly the same kind of experience. It is like I would say analogy the waiter also cooks at the table. So ‑‑ and there are many other things that the network could do. For instance, it is constantly aware of where you are, whether you are connected and what you are doing and it can pass on this information as a service to multiple other ordinary service providers who are today trying to do the same thing on their own. That's not efficient. So you can make it more efficient. And I could go on and on and I'm sure you can think of many things. There is the importance of devices as gatekeepers but there is very good paper on. The measurements matter. Measurement is extremely difficult and we could go and describe in detail. We have a white paper and measuring simple measurement of speed. And once you start doing it you almost don't know what you are measuring. That's what happens when you do it. It is a technical issue. It is not so straightforward. That is the speed and you know what the speed is. Who decides reasonableness is another issue I would like to flag der.
>> VINCENT TOUBIANA: Sorry but we ‑‑
>> SUNIL BAJPAI: Just finishing. So okay let me sum it up. Let me say by using a quotation which is right outside this room which says liberty equality fraternity, a slogan that was given by you by the city, 170 years ago. Is the job done? Have we finished the job? No, we haven't. We have these words quoted in our own constitution and we are still working on. I think we will have to work on Net Neutrality because of the gliications that have been hinted at.
>> VINCENT TOUBIANA: Thank you. Can you speak next about devices?
>> ANAIS LE GOUGUEC: ARCEP we aligned with Thomas's view own enforcement and we have sponsored an app to measure. And to measure the ‑‑ ARCEP's booth you can test the app. It is not available on the Android version but on the iOS version the button, we have that. We agree with you very much. Just my intervention is going to be on devices, the European regulation is focused on ISPs and ensuring that basically the pipes are very neutral in terms of data but at ARCEP we believe that we might be missing something because there is also the faucets which is devices. When you access Internet what you have to use a device and that's the very last link between you and the online content. And in the 2015‑2021 regulation, requires ISP to let end users choose the device of their liking which is very nice. But we do not ‑‑ there is not in the regulation the possibility to investigate how devices can Act also themselves as gatekeepers off John line content. Last year ARCEP implemented devices, we published a first report and a second one more comprehensive this February. The report is called devices weak link in achieving open Internet access. It is available on ARCEP's website and you can also find I think we distributed some of the very nice comic strip to summarize the main findings of the report and you can also find at an ARCEP's booth the main proposal that we have to counter this issues that we have analyzed. So when we talk about devices we have different kind of all types of equipment in mind but in the report we are focused on Smartphones because they are now the almost the most common form of Internet access. For example, in France almost half of the population when they go online they use their mobile phone first and foremost. But so in the report we mostly investigated restrictions that are linked to Smartphones. But the restrictions on all the types of devices actually do exist and even since we published a report we have seen more and more of that and we may have underestimated issues in our report. It is probably worse than we found in the report. So I would say you can three types of restrictions regarding devices. First there are restrictions that are per se kind unavoidable. For example, you have restrixs that are due to nature of device. On the smart watch, connected car, when you connected car you may have for security reasons have something that is very, very easy‑to‑use and that doesn't get you all the ‑‑ get all your attention. So you have a restricted access to the Internet. Maybe that's the whole point of the device. So is it really a problem that's really debatable and you also have restrictions that can appear in exchange for benefits for consumers. For example, it is important to have very up to date OSs, operating systems because it is important for security reasons to have a better, to ensure better privacy but if you have a very often updates of the OS, you can also ‑‑ it also means that you can have devices and apps that get very quickly obsolete and in the end you end up with a very limited access to the online world. In the same way you have also the restrictions that are derivered from the I had dit torual policy of the operating system. On the one hand can provide you with a limited choice of high quality apps which can be central and consumer can find that desirable. But on the other hand, it leaves room for arbitrariness. When the Wiki app was developed the academics that develop the app they submitted the app to the app store and Apple actually refused the app. It said because it was not appropriate.
And in this case it was actually corrected because there was a public backlash because the press talked about the situation. So in the end the decision was reversed but still it can show you how you can have some issues in that regard.
And all those restrictions it is a bit of a gray area because it is quite difficult to assess whether those restrictions are genuine or not. So in that sense there is ‑‑ it can be kind of tricky to assess the validity of those restrictions. And final ly there are restrixs that are without real benefit for the end users. One example that could fit this category is, for example, the commercial battle that you had between Google and Amazon. Amazon does not list popular Google devices in its store. Like the Google Home and the Chrome cast. And in response Google decided to block the Youtube app from some of the Amazon devices. So on this commercial battle it is not very clear to me what the end users can get any benefit from that. Just end up with a more restricted access to what the Internet can offer. So just maybe very quickly on the proposals to deal with that, first we would propose to enshrine the principle of user's freedom of choice to choose their content and application regardless of the device. We also which would be quite aligned to what Thomas's view, it is important to collect information from users both consumers and businesses and put this back to them that is transparent. And to increase the freedom to switch from one device or one environment to another.
We could also help to lift certain restrictions that some stakeholders impose on users and on the developers. For example, we could force to allow users to delete the preinstalled apps. That's what they did in Korea and something that would be quite important is to take swift actions. Because the life expectancy in the digital world is very short. So if you have a complaint, if you have an issue you need to have very quick decisions because otherwise if you have decision that's in your favor but after your business is already down, what's the point of having that.
And I think also Mozilla reacted on these proposals.
>> AMBA KAK: Thank you. In February with ARCEP came out with the report we responded to these proposals. The first thing is congratulations on that report, like as a lawyer I will admit my first reaction as to go to the last page and look for what were the regulatory proposals being proposed and I would encourage everyone to take the time and actually raid the report. It is a pretty key resource to understanding the various restrictions whether or not they are actionable from a regulatory point of view. I will focus on the four proposals, the most more specific proposals that we got from the report and reactions. Preliminary point there is a tend den season aunderstand bl surnl to fit everything in to the neutrality. And we would be a bit skeptical of trying to introduce any conversation about device or OS or app store neutrality in to that framework. And our main response here is that yes, there are keeping powers when it comes to app stores and OS but the nature of the gate keeping power is different. It would do well for the issue to would be fresh. So with that I'll move to the four specific proposals. The first one in the ARCEP report is whether user should be allowed to delete preinstalled apps. It should not risk core functionality. The South Korea model different, they allow them to delete a preinstalled app. Second one, you should enable alternative ranks to show up in your app store. What ranking did that particular app get on another app store. On this we generally agree there should be accountability of costs in an app store in order to ensure fairness to ‑‑ there is a ‑‑ fairness to developers but we do think there might be less interventionists but sort of equally impactful ways to get there. In the same report ARCEP talks about trabs parentsy and we think that's a better mold. It has become a buzz word. Allow a still bit skeptical on show me how it is done and how it had work out when it comes to algorithms and it will not give us the information and fairness we wanting. Give more information as far as possible and how these rankings are done and given opportunity for app developers to contest some of these ‑‑ to contest these decisions or these rankings themselves and think just to take a step back, this discussion on rarngsing speaks to a woudor discussion on how do you improve an optimized discoverability to best serve user interest. A few years Mozilla in an equal rating project we talked about how to urge apps store to get users control over how information is displayed. So I think this is again an evolving discussion. And I will fuse the last few together because they raise the same kinds of tension. Basically on the idea that both the device functions and the APIs should be kind of distributed in a nondiscriminatory basis. Now on the ‑‑ and one part of that that ARCEP notes is that app store's you often get warnings that say do not use this app store because it might be insecure or you get a security warning which is quite broad. Our response is we think the device and OS operators have a legitimate interest in protecting their own users from significant amounts of matter which we know are present on many of these app stores. We think that the right approach here is more specificity and not to say that warnings should not be given but as far as possible these warnings should help users gli. That doesn't really krooe ‑‑ it doesn't send out the right message to the user as well. And then but coming back I think the bigger problem is and this comes up with device functions as well, is that there is going to be attention between this openness goal and the legitimate interests of preserving the pritsy and security of users. At Mozilla we will continue in the next few months to work on interoperability ab what are the kind of policy solutions we can look for. This balance with privacy and how to balance that as we try to open up and encourage more openness and the short answer is that we don't have the solution. It is a hard problem. But like we look forward to working with ARCEP as well as many other stakeholders to try and get there.
>> VINCENT TOUBIANA: Thank you. And then Philippe for last few words to wrap up the discussion.
>> PHILIPPE TOUSIGNANT: I would like to speak to a couple of discrete issues that have just been mentioned and I would like to, for example, on the issue of enforcement and the requirement for a regulators to think in those terms in order to ensure that Net Neutrality regimes are abided by and I would say ‑‑ I would link that to the comment about necessity for swift action. And that we cannot have in years go by between an event and the ‑‑ more than five sentences, and the event ab its Resolution. We built in from the get go transparency processes the carriers have to make those public. And we do receive what they are regularly. So we can look at that. But we also rely on people from normal persons out there in the real world and also companies in the real world to keep us appraised what are new developments that could be an infrijtment on ITMPs or differential pricing practices and I think that is very important. And in transparency what I am seeing in the future is the way that this value that's been re ‑‑ I it is very hard for regulator to talk about the future because I can't commit to the future. But in I look at the debate around Artificial Intelligence and the notion of transparency is morphing in to the notion of explainability and that is going to come up as regulators and policymakers and fellow Internet builders. I would just say then for us in Canada perhaps in what's coming in the next year or so is that we are reviewing both pieces of legislation, that govern our organization and one of the question that is before the panel and before would be to enshrine or not the concepts of Net Neutrality in the legislation. Finally for all from what I hear today and yesterday and I believe that additional cooperation, I mean we at CRTC have signed an agreement with Barak and I increased cooperation and increased disciplinary approaches will ‑‑ are the ‑‑ are the way that we can solve these things together. So that would be my three minutes.
>> VINCENT TOUBIANA: Thank you. We have time for two reactions from the room. Is there any? No. Then that will be perfect. We will be finishing on time. Okay.
>> ANAIS LE GOUGUEC: Just reacting on the last comment regarding the trade offbetween security and interoperability. I think there is ‑‑ there are technical solutions that also exist. For example, in the banking system they found a way to have ‑‑ to actually have interoperability and if the banks manage to do that in a secure way, I think we can probably do the same. If they manage to do that we can also find a solution there, like API oriented solution and stuff like that. I think there are ways that can be ‑‑ that can be thought of to circumvent this tradeoff issue I would say.
>> VINCENT TOUBIANA: Thank you very much. We are now leaving the room for the next session which will be on Net Neutrality and 5G. So still discussing about Net Neutrality and some of the issues that we mentioned earlier in the conversation. Thank you.