Yeah its illegal to offer plans based on throttling/prioritisation in the EU.
> Under these rules, blocking, throttling and discrimination of internet traffic by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) is not allowed in the EU. There are 3 exceptions: compliance with legal obligations; integrity of the network; congestion management in exceptional and temporary situations.
> All traffic has to be treated equally. For example, there can be no prioritisation of traffic in the Internet access service. Equal treatment still allows reasonable day-to-day traffic management according to objectively justified technical requirements, which must be independent of the origin or destination of the traffic and of any commercial considerations.
Interesting, but I wonder if this exception would not allow the same:
> congestion management in exceptional and temporary situations.
I presume the US mobile networks are primarily selling higher priority that applies (since it only needs to be applied) in exceptional and temporary situations.
I'd say the EU are generally less tolerant of loophole based exploitation of the law than the US (see for example the potential Apple USB-C speed throttling in the news recently). Anyone who tried this kind of thing would get sanctioned pretty quick.
> Under these rules, blocking, throttling and discrimination of internet traffic by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) is not allowed in the EU. There are 3 exceptions: compliance with legal obligations; integrity of the network; congestion management in exceptional and temporary situations.
> All traffic has to be treated equally. For example, there can be no prioritisation of traffic in the Internet access service. Equal treatment still allows reasonable day-to-day traffic management according to objectively justified technical requirements, which must be independent of the origin or destination of the traffic and of any commercial considerations.
https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/open-inter...
For the time being the UK is still aligned with EU law on this but there's lobbying to make things more like the US:
https://cei.org/blog/how-the-uk-can-reform-can-improve-inter...