It was just a matter of time for the Dutch party PVV to come with their point of view regarding the charging of mobile services such as Skype and What'sApp. After the opposition parties (PvdA, SP, D66 and Groen Links) of the Dutch parliament were very critical about the possible price differentiation of Dutch telecom providers and the Dutch party VVD was on the other positive about the differentiation, the PVV now had to respond.

A brief summary: the opposition parties suggested that the blocking, pricing and throttling of mobile services should be prohibited. The party VVD then came with a proposal allowing the pricing of certain mobile services. Telecom operators such as KPN want extra money for services like Skype and What'sApp because they require a lot of capacity and compete with their own products, namely phone calling and texting.

Now the Dutch party PVV goes along with the opinion of the opposition parties, and also is against the additional tax on mobile services. A member of the PVV, Van Bemmel, does however say that first all aspects of the proposal of the opposition have to be investigated before the proposal is directly supported. The PVV plays an important role in the debate, because the PVV can give the opposition party's proposal a majority of votes.

You might wonder how the telecom providers can deal with the situation of the increasing use of popular services such as What'sApp. On the one hand you could argue that taxes on these mobile services is at odds with the principle of net neutrality and that the taxes give the telecom companies much power. On the other hand, these 'free' services give less income for the telecom companies while using streaming video services the pressure on the network and the need for additional investments increases.

Perhaps the solution is more expensive subscriptions for large users of fast mobile Internet? 

Reference: Nu.nl