No exclusive differentiation

Principle 7: No exclusive differentiation

Preferential treatment of services should only be permitted if offered non-exclusively, i.e. there should be no exclusive contracts at wholesale level and no exclusive preference for the provider's own services. The only exceptions are cases in which the decision on differentiation rests essentially with the end user. These mainly involve services such as IPTV or VoB (referred to as “specialised services”) which are provided by the same ISP but not on the public Internet.

Exclusive differentiation restricts the options of both end users and CAPs. In general, differentiation results in disadvantages for non-preferred CAPs, which can then raise the barriers to market entry and lead ultimately to a reduction in the number of CAPs. This effect is even more marked in the case of exclusive differentiation.