A Consolidation Bill With a Costly Omission
On 9 June 2026, Stichting Digitale Infrastructuur Nederland (DINL) — the Dutch trade association representing AMS-IX, SIDN, SURFnet and other core internet infrastructure operators — joined 37 organisations, including BEUC, European Digital Rights (EDRi), the Internet Society and i2Coalition, in a joint statement warning that the European Commission's proposed Digital Networks Act (DNA) would weaken net neutrality protections that have held since 2015. DINL's own policy platform states its mission as ensuring internet access "remains free from private interests" — language that maps directly onto the coalition's central complaint.
The DNA, adopted by the Commission on 21 January 2026 under procedure 2026/0013(COD), is not a fringe proposal. It merges four overlapping instruments — the European Electronic Communications Code, the BEREC Regulation, the Radio Spectrum Policy Programme, and the core provisions of the Open Internet Regulation (Regulation 2015/2120) — into a single directly applicable Regulation. The Commission frames this as overdue simplification for an industry that has spent a decade navigating parallel, sometimes conflicting, telecom instruments.
Steelmanning the Commission's Case
That framing deserves a fair hearing before it gets dismantled. Europe's telecom operators have argued for years, through groups like Connect Europe, that a handful of large content and cloud platforms generate a disproportionate share of network traffic without contributing to the infrastructure costs that carry it — the so-called "fair share" debate. A rational, proportionate response to that pressure would neither impose mandatory network fees (which risk raising costs for smaller platforms and duplicating the Digital Markets Act's gatekeeper regime) nor ignore operators' complaints entirely. According to Tech Policy Press's review of the text, the Commission did exactly the sensible middle thing: it dropped the mandatory-fee idea telcos wanted and replaced it with a voluntary "ecosystem cooperation mechanism" for interconnection and traffic-efficiency talks, with no binding financial obligations attached. That is a genuinely pro-innovation call — telecom lobbies wanted arbitration teeth; CCIA Europe, representing large tech platforms, called the voluntary approach a "step backwards" precisely because it lacks force. When both sides of a lobbying fight are unhappy with the same provision, that is often a sign the Commission found a defensible middle ground.
Consolidating four statutes into one also has real merit. Fragmented telecom law is a genuine compliance burden, and a single Regulation reduces the interpretive friction of operators and regulators cross-referencing multiple instruments — an underrated efficiency gain that rarely gets credit in fights over the substance.
Where the Coalition Has a Point
The substantive net neutrality articles are not the problem the coalition is flagging — the recitals are. Tech Policy Press reports that the DNA's Article 206 repeals Articles 3, 4, 5 and 9 of the Open Internet Regulation (equal traffic treatment, transparency duties, and national regulator enforcement powers) and folds equivalent language into the new Regulation. But according to EDRi and the digital-rights group epicenter.works, the DNA deletes 18 of the Open Internet Regulation's 19 explanatory recitals in the process — the interpretive text that, per EDRi, "shaped how judges and regulators interpreted the law" and fed directly into Court of Justice of the EU rulings and BEREC's enforcement guidelines on zero-rating, traffic management and specialised services.
This is a real, not hypothetical, cost. Recitals are not legally binding in the way operative articles are, but EU courts and regulators lean on them constantly to resolve ambiguity — precisely the ambiguity that net neutrality law is full of (what counts as a "specialised service"? when does traffic management become discriminatory?). Stripping that scaffolding while keeping the black-letter rules means the next contested case gets litigated with a decade less interpretive guidance than BEREC and national regulators, including the Netherlands' ACM, have built up since 2015.
The coalition's second concern — that Articles 191–193's "ecosystem cooperation" mechanism could function as a backdoor to network fees even without a binding mandate — is more speculative but not unreasonable. A formal Commission-run review process that treats voluntary interconnection deals as evidence of market inadequacy could, over several review cycles, generate soft pressure toward exactly the fee structures the Commission says it rejected. EDRi notes that over 99% of internet peering arrangements today are already settlement-free and function without any formal mechanism — which raises the fair question of what problem Articles 191–193 solve that isn't already being solved by the market.
The Fix Doesn't Require Reopening the Whole Bill
None of this requires killing the DNA's consolidation goal, which is genuinely useful. It requires the European Parliament's ITRE committee, now reviewing the file, to do two narrow things: restore the interpretive recitals that give net neutrality's operative text its meaning, and add explicit language to Articles 191–193 confirming the cooperation mechanism cannot evolve into a fee-setting process without a fresh legislative mandate. Both are surgical amendments, not a rewrite. Proportionate regulation means matching the fix to the actual defect — and here the defect is a stripped rulebook margin, not the consolidation itself.