Thursday I spoke in Brussels at a well-attended seminar on "Net Neutrality and the [EU] Reform Proposals for the Electronic Communications Sector." The event had a number of sponsors, including two Belgian Universities (Namur and Leuven) the ISP Association of Belgium and some consultancies. It appears that the neutrality norm for internet governance is becoming widely discussed in Europe and is influencing the European Commission's implementation of its sectoral reform efforts. Indeed there is a Principle proposed in Article 8 that end users should be able to access and distribute content and use the applications of their choice.

Chris Boam of Verizon was there and made some interesting comments. One was that Verizon has no interest in Deep Packet Inspection technologies and has rejected the idea of implementing them. The other was that Verizon's Open Development Initiative, which supposedly loosened up its vertical leverage over wireless handsets on its network, was "not a change in policy" but simply a re-packaging and more aggressive public promotion of its prior policy, which was that any handset manufacturer or developer could approach Verizon and be approved if they met some basic criteria. Hmmm...   more »