Amendments to Dutch Telecom law codify net neutrality and restrict the use of cookies

In a controversial plenary voting session yesterday, the Dutch parliament adopted several amendments to the Telecommunications Act in order to comply with EU Directives on IT and telecom law. This led to a new draft law on Telecommunication, which has been accepted by majority vote, today.

As we reported earlier on this website, the majority of Dutch MPs is particularly concerned about maintaining a free and open Internet, the protection of privacy and consumer interests. The parliamentary debate resulted in a legal approach that is unique in the European Union.

The draft law now de facto prescribes net neutrality in The Netherlands. Telco's and ISPs c.s. are no longer allowed to block, delay or obstruct in any way, services and other internet and/or telecom traffic, unless this is necessary for reasons of congestion management, security, continuity of the network, et cetera.

The Netherlands is the only EU country and the second state in the world -after Chile-, to codify this principle. How this will be put into practice is currently unpredictable, as the parliament has also created a quite peculiar exception to this new blocking and filtering ban, namely the possibility of filtering for "ideological reasons". This ideological exception was proposed by the Christian fractions in parliament and gained an unexpected majority because of a voting mistake by the Labour Party. Reportedly, the Labour Party will file a new amendment to delete this ‘relgious escape’ as soon as possible.

In addition, the new telecom law prescribes that privacy law applies to the use of all cookies and that cookies may only be placed with the “unambiguous consent” of the consumer. Although the law acknowledges that requests for consent should not ruin user friendliness of websites, many stakeholders fear this is exactly what will happen.

The amended telecom legislation has not yet entered into force, as it is now up to the Senate to approve the proposed law.