Canadian Net Neutrality: cease and desist to Bell Canada
You may have forgotten, or simply not know, Canada has reached the crunch point in deciding whether the Canadian ISPs should be allowed to govern what type of traffic is sent over their wires.
Last year I commented:
Legal precedent states that your ISP is a Common Carrier. This means that they are not responsible for policing what kind of packets they deliver to your house, nor do they have any right to go poking around in the packets delivered to you. So, if you want to read the political views of an ousted dissonant your ISP is not responsible for enforcing that rule. Their role is to get the information from one place to another, with neither interest nor responsibility for the content.
While it is fair that ISPs should be able to charge for the amount of traffic, (this bears down on their infrastructure) why should they have the right to select what that traffic is used for.
From a business standpoint, your ISP doesn’t want to provide just the roads. It wants to sell Ice Creams and to transport Diamonds. More than that, it wants to levy a toll on anyone that uses its roads for such value added services. They want their fingers in every pie.
Last week, Bell Canada took this to a new level. They started not only filtering their own customer’s traffic, they started impacting resellers, wholesale providers that buy bandwidth in bulk from Bell and sell to their own customers. In filtering the types of traffic those ISPs could deliver doing so they excised force in the market, trashing the business models of tens of ISPs across the country, directly impacting millions and scuppering technology innovation by organisations such as Canada’s Broadcasting Corporation:
On Sunday, CBC offered a final episode of reality TV program Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister for download via BitTorrent, a file-sharing service. The release was an experiment for the public broadcaster in new ways of offering its programming.
However, downloaders who blogged about the experience on the Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister site complained about very long periods required to download the show.
One user received a notice that it could take 2½ hours to download, while another was quoted 11 hours. The bottleneck is occurring because ISPs such as Rogers and Bell limit the amount of bandwidth allocated for file-swapping on BitTorrent.
“The CRTC has to date largely avoided the net neutrality issue, however, that is about to change. The Canadian Association of Internet Providers, Canada’s largest ISP association, has filed a Part VII application with the CRTC asking it to direct Bell Canada to cease and desist from throttling its wholesale Internet service. The application, which was filed late yesterday and is not yet posted on the CRTC site, is the most significant legal development in the Canadian net neutrality debate yet since it places the issue squarely before the Commission. The filing provides additional insights into Bell’s action - the throttling has reduced speeds by as much as 90 percent - and marks an important milestone since the outcome will provide a clear answer on whether Canadian law currently protects net neutrality or if legislative reform is needed.”
What you can do
Check out Steve Anderson’s Campaign for Democratic Media and the Stop the Throttler campaigns. Share your story.
- http://www.stopthethrottler.ca/
- http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=10734109708
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5UvAKcxTGE
- http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/business/story.html?id=4ac678a5-38e7-40dc-8d80-80e6e8e01aeb&p=2
- http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2008/04/02/tech-bell.html
- http://www.thestar.com/sciencetech/article/407730
- http://blogs.itworldcanada.com/insights/2008/04/03/and-then-there-was-two-bell-canada-seeks-to-wipe-out-isp-competitors/
My thanks go to my friend Sandy Kemsley for the link.
April 4th, 2008 at 11:17 am
[…] Jack Schofield wrote an interesting post today on Canadian Net Neutrality: cease and desist to Bell CanadaHere’s a quick excerptCBC offered a final episode of reality TV program Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister for download via BitTorrent, a file-sharing service. […]