The European Court of Justice (ECJ) has provided its first ruling on Europe’s 2015 net neutrality rules, which require telecoms operators to treat all internet traffic equally. The rules prevent telecoms operators from blocking or slowing down traffic, or offering paid fast lanes.
The ECJ ruled that the Hungary’s telecom Telenor had infringed the EU’s regulation on open Internet access, which prohibits the blocking, throttling and discrimination of internet traffic by service providers in the EU.
The Budapest High Court referred the matter to the ECJ for a preliminary ruling in a dispute between Hungarian internet service provider Telenor and the Hungarian National Media and Telecom Authority (NMHH).
The services offered by Telenor to its customers included two packages with preferential access (known as ‘zero-tariffs’) whereby data traffic generated by certain specific applications such as Spotify, Netflix and Facebook did not count towards the consumption of data volume purchased by customers.
In 2017, NMHH contended that the packages did not comply with the general obligation of equal and non-discriminatory treatment of traffic as laid down in EU regulations and that Telenor had to put an end to the measures.
The ECJ held that "where measures blocking or slowing down traffic are based not on objectively different technical quality of service requirements for specific categories of traffic, but on commercial considerations, those measures must in themselves be regarded as incompatible with Article 3 of the Regulation".
“The greater the number of customers concluding such agreements, the more likely it is that, given its scale, the cumulative effect of those agreements will result in a significant limitation of the exercise of end-users’ rights,” the Court found.
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