Last week the European Parliament organised hearings to confirm the new list of European Commissioners, including Neelie Kroes who is proposed to be the new EU Commissioner for the ‘Digital Agenda’ (the policy area formerly known as ‘Information Society’). Ms Kroes has been the Competition Commissioner since 2004, tackling many big cases, including one that started in 2008 on the blocking of VoIP on mobile.

With the European Commission conducting a formal review of Net Neutrality in Europe this year, Ms Kroes’ position is crucial in protecting users’ right to decide what content they want to send and receive, and which services, applications, hardware and software they want to use on the Internet.

Well, we may be in for a treat. In response to a number of questions on the subject from European parliamentarians, Ms Kroes told MEPs that she had put a loveheart next to the topic of ‘net neutrality’ on her briefing papers. She sees as a key aspect of her term as Digital Agenda Commissioner the aim to “preserve the open and neutral Internet”, adding that

“there’s a couple of reasons to be very vigilant for new threats to Net Neutrality which can arise from many sources, and blocking and discrimination against VoIP services by mobile operators in a number of European countries are just one example … For me, it’s main [key] that we’re not blocking opportunities for certain technologies…. Open and clear cut net neutrality is needed.”

She went into more detail in relation to what she would see as appropriate traffic management:

“The core issue is whether Internet access providers and broadband providers should be able to exercise control and limit users’ access to any content; to me that is a no go when it’s done for commercially motivated reasons; only for security reasons or when spam is involved …; [if it’s for] commercially motivated reasons, that’s not net neutrality.”

Now, Skype and Internet users throughout Europe look forward to Ms Kroes taking her post and working from day one on forcing those network operators that discriminate against Skype and its users to stop their abuse immediately. We look forward to being involved, together with user / consumer representatives and other Internet companies in the ‘Open Internet Summit’ announced yesterday in the second and last hearing by Ms Kroes, as part of the Commission review of Net Neutrality.

However, although we see a lot of promising signs coming from the European Commission, we need to keep in mind that the national governments and national regulators still have to do their homework and establish (and enforce!) clear net neutrality rules in their respective countries.

Looking at the current debate in the US, we see that even if the authorities decide to protect net neutrality, as the Obama administration does, the struggle is not over at all. Those that believe that they can control what users do online just because in their mind the Internet ‘belongs’ to them (and not to users) have the resources and the commercial motives to make their voices heard. As alluded to in Josh’s speech at the CES show just over a week ago (see Chris’s blog post), the many thousands of filings and over 100,000 comments on the open Internet rules proposed by the US regulator FCC are a clear sign of the need to stay alert and take nothing for granted. Neither in the US nor in Europe.

Photo from the World Economic Forum