The European Commission is trying to break the deadlock in telecoms single market package legislative process. Last year, the EP adopted its position with a strong emphasis on net neutrality and end of roaming inside the EU. After several months, the EU member states in the Council adopted their position, significantly watering down the MEPs´ proposals. Roaming was to be decided upon after 2018 (until then, consumers would be granted a small basic allowance for roaming traffic) and net neutrality formulations were much vaguer than the EP´s. The main concern in net neutrality is the provision of so-called special services. Such special services traffic has in principle privileged position in the bandwidth, thus possibly limiting the overall Internet connectivity of normal consumers. The EP did not rule out the possibility of special services, but placed strict limitations – in fact almost a list of admissible special services was adopted by the MEPs. The Council was much more vaguer, setting only basic principles. MEPs and consumers´ representatives worry, that such vagueness would mean that the rules would in fact not be respected at all. The Commission, part of the negotiating trilogue, now proposed a compromise – the telecoms package would allow service providers to sell some services apart from the general net access, but these would not be allowed to limit the consumers. The principles are stricter that the Council´s, but not as specific as the EP´s list of admissible services. The telecoms package is one of the key priorities of the Commission.

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