France - Something is Missing in ARCEP's Reasonable Traffic Management

  

When watching the news from France, it seems that the public is only interested in the government’s pension plan changes. However, according to ARCEP the communications regulator, some people are also interested in ARCEP's plans for network neutrality.

During a one hour of chat (hosted by Nadia Trainar (pictured) and Guillaume Mellier of ARCEP), 487 people asked 102 questions (of which 60 made directly during the chat). The script (in French) is available here.

One of the questions was about "une gestion admissible du trafic" (or "reasonable traffic management", in the US definition).

The answer is:

"For us, first thing is to consider the purpose of a traffic management practice. Some services cannot exist without some of quality of service or security guarantees ... This is the case, for example of VOD. In other cases it may be priorities imposed by regulation - for example, emergency calls. These are examples of what is called "managed services". For internet access, however, the normal operating mode is without traffic management".

This response does not consider (or actually ignores) the congestion issue, or other aspects of "fair" allocation of network resources. Compare to - USA, Israel.