"Basic rules of fairness" is meaningless crap that roughly translates to, "we aren't as good so we will keep passing regulations in favor of locals until it's insane for anyone else to try."

Frankly, it wouldn't be that surprising if net neutrality started getting violated in Europe by protectionism laws.

We see "fairness" as "fairness for the customer". Jesus said "justice in favour of the poor". If it's just, saying it's in favour of someone ahead of the judgement is ridiculously biased.

However, if we granted more fairness to the companies, we wouldn't have more or better companies. We'd just be invaded by huge US companies, because they're just better and move faster. So, yes, we have to start with smaller actors who just rely on the openness of the markets of dominant actors: We couldn't build Apple but we rely on their Appstore to have fair rules, we couldn't build Amazon EC2 but our companies rely on the openness of the EC2 service, we couldn't build Windows but we rely on Microsoft publishing its API. And this API documentation is exactly the subject of the $2bn fine that Microsoft received from EU in 2003.

I'm sorry, perhaps US performs too well, but we need open APIs in Europe. From the fines I've seen, the decisions aren't generic protectionism, they're focused on keeping free market so we can have some local startups too.

I have family in Germany who get their internet through Deutsche Telekom. When visiting I've found its faster to watch YouTube via a VPN through Switzerland than directly through Deutsche Telekom. While this doesn't prove anything it sure does feel like they already violate net neutrality when it comes to YouTube

DTAG benefits from inertia, being the offspring of the public post/telecom monopoly they started with a 100% customer base.

As for the issue at hand (YT being slow), like a sibling post states, that's because they refuse to peer at DECIX where everybody else is. They even tried to frame the NSA scandals as "IT companies, be responsible, keep user data in German networks and peer with us directly (on our terms, which will be expensive for you - they 'forgot' to mention that in the press releases)".

The best way to make DTAG more customer friendly (both upstream and downstream) is to move somewhere else.

Luckily in cities you have 5+ ISPs to choose from (some of them DTAG resellers, but still an improvement), and even on the country side it's typically at least 3.

More probably this is routing issue. Connection between Deutsche Telekom and Youtube servers is more busy than connections between DT -> Swiss server -> Youtube.

DTAG (Deutsche Telekom AG) essentially does the exact same with YouTube that Verizon did with Netflix: They refuse to peer with them at all.

ALL traffic from DTAG users first runs to a Level3 datacenter in New York, and from there goes to other users.

While all other German ISPs have a peering node at DECIX

To add, when you're asking DTAG to peer, they determine the location where they set up the peering point with you. That's typically somewhere out of nowhere, so you also have to rent the pipe that brings your data there - from them, obviously.

Additionally, they overcharge a lot for the last mile infrastructure for other ISPs, so in my region some other ISPs started building their own last mile infrastructure and peering with Telia to get access to TAT-14 (and thereby allowing them to peer better with US providers).

(TAT-14 is a transatlantic cable owned by DTAG and Telia)

Do you have a source for this assertion?

Take https://netzpolitik.org/2015/telekom-am-internetknoten-de-ci... for example.

It’s common knowledge in the industry by now that the DTAG uses their 40 million users as leverage to force companies to directly peer with them (and pay for peering).

That might keep out the euros and pounds they pay to employees there: forced liquidation of Google's physical European presences is not a good outcome for anyone. But it wouldn't keep out their products. It just means a lot of job losses and higher latencies on page loads as they get served from US datacenters instead of EU datacenters.