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Never knew that the Netherlands and Brazil are the only countries in the world that have net neutrality as a law. Like with legal euthanasia, drugs, gay marriage, etc., as a Dutchman I'm amazed at how non-liberal much of the world is.



Oh! Thin and light; missed that one. Thanks!


As a Portuguese, I have never felt the need for net neutrality laws. I have four ISPs competing to provide me service, and as far as I know they're all "neutral", including with regard to bittorrent traffic and such.

I also raise you full decriminalization of all drug consumption :) though I'd still like to see legalization at least of a few softer drugs.


"Personal data protected"? So it is protected while our government stores it for 6 to 12 months?


As far as i know its not the government that keeps the data itself, is the ISP's and service providers.. its a minimum period of archiving, for them to respect, so if a law enforcement signed by a judge ask them to reveal some logs for instance, they should have it, if its in the date range they have defined, or else they would also be accountable.

I think this is quite good


There's a voluntary program in the Netherlands that financially compensates ISPs for uploading logs to a central database where law enforcement is free to query it without, in practice, judicial oversight.

Laws are great, but they're easily circumvented. Especially in the Netherlands. That's why this "Free Internet" project is reasonably useless. Its view is too narrow, focusing only on official laws and not on actual practices. For instance, after the whole Project-X incident[1], law enforcement has been looking into being able to remove social media posts on a whim, without judicial oversight. Such underwater erosion of rights is common in the Netherlands.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_X_Haren


> its a minimum period of archiving

And a maximum. Privacy laws also dictate that data should not be retained longer than needed for the purpose for which you're storing it. If you store data for statistics, a few days would be the max because you can count hits and anonymize data almost immediately. If you store data for the government and the government only needs it for 6 months, then after 6 months you have no right to store it anymore. And ISPs really stick to this.




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