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Recitals 1, 3, 6 to 9 and 11 of Regulation 2015/2120 are worded as follows: ‘(1) This Regulation aims to establish common rules to safeguard equal and non-discriminatory treatment of traffic in the provision of internet access services and related end users’ rights. It aims to protect end users and simultaneously to guarantee the continued functioning of the internet ecosystem as an engine of innovation. … … (3) The internet has developed over the past decades as an open platform for innovation with low access barriers for end users, providers of content, applications and services and providers of internet access services. The existing regulatory framework aims to promote the ability of end users to access and distribute information or run applications and services of their choice. However, a significant number of end users are affected by traffic-management practices which block or slow down specific applications or services. Those tendencies require common rules at the Union level to ensure the openness of the internet and to avoid fragmentation of the internal market resulting from measures adopted by individual Member States. … (6) End users should have the right to access and distribute information and content, and to use and provide applications and services without discrimination, via their internet access service. … (7) In order to exercise their rights to access and distribute information and content and to use and provide applications and services of their choice, end users should be free to agree with providers of internet access services on tariffs for specific data volumes and speeds of the internet access service. Such agreements, as well as any commercial practices of providers of internet access services, should not limit the exercise of those rights and thus circumvent provisions of this Regulation safeguarding open internet access. National regulatory and other competent authorities should be empowered to intervene against agreements or commercial practices which, by reason of their scale, lead to situations where end users’ choice is materially reduced in practice. To this end, the assessment of agreements and commercial practices should, inter alia, take into account the respective market positions of those providers of internet access services, and of the providers of content, applications and services, that are involved. National regulatory and other competent authorities should be required, as part of their monitoring and enforcement function, to intervene when agreements or commercial practices would result in the undermining of the essence of the end users’ rights. (8) When providing internet access services, providers of those services should treat all traffic equally, without discrimination, restriction or interference, independently of its sender or receiver, content, application or service, or terminal equipment. … (9) The objective of reasonable traffic management is to contribute to an efficient use of network resources and to an optimisation of overall transmission quality responding to the objectively different technical quality of service requirements of specific categories of traffic, and thus of the content, applications and services transmitted. Reasonable traffic-management measures applied by providers of internet access services should be transparent, non-discriminatory and proportionate, and should not be based on commercial considerations. … … (11) Any traffic management practices which go beyond such reasonable traffic-management measures, by blocking, slowing down, altering, restricting, interfering with, degrading or discriminating between specific content, applications or services, or specific categories of content, applications or services, should be prohibited, subject to the justified and defined exceptions laid down in this Regulation. Those exceptions should be subject to strict interpretation and to proportionality requirements. Specific content, applications and services, as well as specific categories thereof, should be protected because of the negative impact on end user choice and innovation of blocking, or of other restrictive measures not falling within the justified exceptions. …’