RespectMyNet established to catalogue European net neutrality violations

• New net neutrality campaign formed
• Aims to monitor net neutrality violations across Europe

An alliance of European digital rights organisations is setting up an online platform to report net neutrality violations across Europe. ‘Respect My Net’ claims it will enable Internet users to whistle-blow any cases of discrimination, blocking, restricting access and so on that they come across while online.

The joint initiative is backed by Access Now, Bits of Freedom, Digitale Gesellschaft, EDRi, Initiative fur Netzfreiheit, IT-POL, La Quadrature du Net, Nurpa, Open Rights Group and Xnet and they say that the idea is to collect data and catalogue ‘abusive behaviour’ by ISPs. Characterising ‘sponsored data’ (say) as abusive behaviour is an interesting semantic device and should ruffle a few feathers.

The need, say the organisations, is pressing. Far from last year’s European legislation settling matters around net neutrality, the supporters of Respect My Net point out that the Telecommunication Single Market regulation left the detail about what will constitute non-neutral behaviour to national regulators.  That means the one big fight will now atomise into 27 or so little skirmishes - whether that dynamic will assist neutrality-busting ISPs and telcos or the neutrality activists is the big question.

The organisers say Respect My Net is a simple platform and provides some “easy-to-use tools which help [with] monitoring whether or not your Internet Service Provider is manipulating or restricting your Internet traffic.”