MrShaggy tips us to news that the debate over Net Neutrality in Canada is coming to the forefront following the recent discovery that Bell Canada was throttling P2P traffic on the access it had sold to wholesalers. Michael Geist's blog notes a video recording of comments from a member of the Canadian government, as well as coverage from Canadian media. From Ars Technica:
"The Canadian government has in the past pushed the CRTC to deregulate the telecom industry, an approach still backed by Minister of Industry Jim Prentice. Prentice also wants to stay out of the current net neutrality debate, which would seem to be a de facto vote against the idea. He was asked in the House of Commons this week whether his government would do anything about the current Bell/Rogers traffic-shaping controversy. According to the Globe & Mail, Prentice said only that "we will continue to leave the matter between consumers on the one hand and Internet service providers on the other."
The Free Expression of Thought is never useless. Just because you think "classic video games of the 70s" is a waste of space does not mean the owner, or his visitors, think it's a waste. Don't be elitist. Support egalitarianism (where all people have a right to pursue their own hobbies, and share their thoughts with the world). Don't sit there and say what is or is not "acceptable speech". It is ALL acceptable because we ALL have an inalienable right to speak our minds freely.
CANADA:
What will likely happen is that Rogers (the consumer) will located a new ISP provider that will not throttle their bandwidth and then say, "Goodbye Bell". That's how the free market works.
I didn't mention the 70's games. You really need to read more carefully. And I do support egalitarianism, but the fact that I support it doesn't make it true. The fact that I support it doesn't change the fact that the net is indeed elitist.
It doesn't really matter WHAT you mentioned. The point is you said a large chunk of the internet is "a waste".
Who are you to make that judgment call? What you call "waste" I might call "useful". I repeat: Don't be elitist and decide what should or should not exist on the web.
What will likely happen is that Teksaavy (the consumer) will located a new ISP provider that will not throttle their bandwidth and then say, "Goodbye Bell". That's how the free market works.
But that's impossible. Bell controls the phonelines, i.e. the 'last mile'. There are only two currently viable methods to get broadband to the consumer, cable (Rogers), and the phoneline (Bell).
The free market works great, when there's competition. But there's no competition going on here. Little guys like teksavvy only exist because Bell is mandated to lease their lines.
Ahhh, spoken like somebody who truly doesn't know what they're talking about.
First of all, Bell owns pretty much all the lines, the "last mile" required for any ADSL connection. That leaves pretty much Roger's as their only major competition, as they are a cable-internet provider (they are not a consumer).
There are many other ISP's that offer ADSL services, but they all use Bell lines, and the big issue currently is that Bell is throttling the traffic of their customers. Many of these companies, such as my own provider - Teksavvy - offer reasonable and good service, and have been quite vocal about how Bell is interfering with their services.
So really, the only choice other than Bell is... well.. Rogers. Unfortunately Roger's has a lack of affordable premium options (static IP's, etc), also throttles, port-blocks, and is in general known for service no better than Bell.
That means that:
viable options for the average consumer = 0
The saddest part is that Bell is still getting a cut from all the companies that are leasing lines to provide ADSL service, while doing almost nothing themselves. I would know, because as I've mentioned before, I'm on an ADSL connection that is craptastically slow due to the fact that Bell has overextended the connection to their CO, rather than adding a local repeater/node.
The only other option I could think of would be the local hydro company's (in Toronto at least) wireless offerings, but unfortunately those only work in certain areas, and mine isn't one of them (I've heard that the service is fairly decent though).
- Bell which is lower in price, but throttles the bandwidth due to limited cable availability.
- Rogers which is higher in price, but uses that higher cost to buy extra cables & doesn't need to throttle.
- (Are you sure there's no third company? Like AT&T or Sprint or MCI?)
-
So you see Teksaavy DOES have options. Each of these 2 choices has a drawback (throttling on one hand; higher price on the other), but that's life in a nutshell. You have to weigh the p
What will likely happen is that Rogers (the consumer) will located a new ISP provider that will not throttle their bandwidth and then say, "Goodbye Bell". That's how the free market works.
What you goddammed fuckingly terminally stupid yankees fail to get with your pigheadedly assinine fear of whatever the government decides to do is that there cannot be a free market when the last mile is totally unregulated private property.
You yanks are so fucking blinded by your cultural hangups against the governme
You mean a few selected stores selling a small selection of goods to a price that's marginally lower than in the real world, without any possible competition at all since the airport decides who should be allowed to sell?
Sounds pretty much like what we'd get without net neutrality, and what the big telcos would like to see.
Is anyone else really confused about these ISP's aren't being sued to oblivion for breach of contract?? I'm no expect(ok, I work with wan lines pretty often, but still), but if I have a serious line(say, a t3?) and I find out the SOB ISP is throttling ANY of my data(or even reading it), I will bring an unholy hell of a lawsuit upon them. The likes of which makes most lawyer's cry themselves to sleep. What the hell is going on??
Usually, though, a good amount of the fine print doesn't stand up in court.
I think the fine print usually equates to putting on a really thick winter coat under a bulletproof vest; yeah, it's technically extra protection, but if you're at the point where you need it, barring a miracle, you're probably already screwed. You can put anything in a contract, but if it says that you don't have to support your other obligations within the contract, it won't stand.
IANAL and I only took 1 business law class in high school, so I'm more than likely wrong.;)
They're not throttling dedicated lines, they're throttling oversold DSL/Cable and it's covered in AUPs. Neither is there anything wrong with traffic shaping, I don't want my SSH/FTP connections slowing to a crawl because some drooling tard is bit-torrenting Hentai with a high upload ratio.
Who's to say that your Downloads are any more important than the Hentai downloads?
In a society where all our treated equally under the law, such a distinction cannot be made.
That's the problem withh p2p protocols like bittorrrent. They essentially exploit the fact that the more streams you have the more bandwidth you get, thus (depending on how you look at it) either making their download have higher priority or make yours have a lower priority.
Bittorrent doesn't segment its transfers for speed. The transfers are to and from different hosts - they are segmented for swarming, for the distributed nature of the protocol. Segmented TCP transfers such as with download managers should not be, with modern TCP stacks, normally faster than single ones except in cases of major packet loss (in which case the network is already screwed).
Bittorrent is dependent on lots of other networks; it goes slower than a single TCP transfer from a fast network.
Regardless, it's not my fault or problem that my Hentai torrents are slowing your SSH/FTP connections to a crawl, it is the fault of the ISP that you paid for bandwidth which you are not getting and your fault for continuing to pay them. Why should my Hentai torrents be faulted when I am merely using what I paid for?
If he is promised 6M on the download, and that's what he uses, then I will have to disagree with you. It doesn't matter if he uses the pipe getting hentai (care to share?) or is using it to chuck linux ISOs about. He is not using it beyond the specifications outlined. He is using 6M and no more.
You're missing the real problem. I'm gonna pull numbers out of my ass, because I have sinus problems and pulling them out my nose right now would prove impractical. If net company X has a total of 100M of ban
Who's to say that your Downloads are any more important than the Hentai downloads?
The fact that a 5-second delay in an SSH session makes working very difficult, while a 5-second delay in getting a movie that already takes two hours to download is practically meaningless. Certain protocols are more time-sensitive than others, and anyone that actually understands what Net Neutrality is really about knows this.
yeah, right. Let's all pretend that you couldn't tunnel content in ssh or that ftp was never used for wares ( or hentai for that matter). The idea of traffic grooming is fine as long as the customer knows what he is buying into. Most customers wouldn't know bandwidth grooming from overbooking & this is why it happens.
If they did know, if they were made aware of the fact that their spanking new DSL advertised at XKb/s is worth X/10 worth of their favourite content, they'd likely choose alternatives --
Shaping isn't realy the issue most ISP's will shape if theres high load on the network but this isn't what is happening with Bell and Rogers they don't have a bandwith problem in most places. In major cities there is a giant pile of dark fiber. Rogers ran as bundle as big as my head a couple of blocks from were I work 2 years ago, the point is the invasivess of the shaping based on application, meaning they are monitoing the protocols and what is in the packets not the overall bandwith thats the problem http [nowtoronto.com]
Here is what your not understanding or at least pretending to not understand; these people, the ISP's have bought and paid for X amount of bandwidth and transfer from Bell, brought that level of service to the central office where it is distributed of lines leased to the ISP's to the ultimate consumers, the ISP's customers, and they are not getting X amount of bandwidth and transfer from Bell, because Bell, the wholesaler, is throttling. A T1 line doesn't cost U$ 300.00 a month because it is blazingly fast
that block of uninteresting, unfunny gibberish that must have taken you some time to compose is what you do with your spare time. why? is your life so empty? i don't understand "trolling organisations". It's not like its even funny - it rarely even makes sense. weird.....
I suffered with satellite for years. I was among the first one several different systems. I remember having to upload with a dial-up modem in the beginning! If I had to choose between going back to satellite or having a throttled cable connection, I'd choose the throttled cable connection without batting an eye. It may be throttled, but at least P2P activities aren't blocked altogether and threatening to push you over the pitifully small and ridiculously overpriced bandwidth limit.
by Anonymous Coward
on Friday April 04 2008, @05:16AM (#22961248)
So basically consumers in this case have 3 choices: Satellite(slow), Cable(throttled), DSL(throttled).
How are they going to vote with their wallet? No matter what they choose, they're supporting sub-standard internet. This seems to me a case in which the ISPs need to be regulated because they have a monopoly.
Lots of well-intentioned people involved with the "Net Neutrality" debate have the right idea, but are fighting the wrong war. The IMPORTANT battle is for "Last-Mile" neutrality. If AT&T is allowed to provision 6.0m/512k DSL for their own subscribers, they should be EQUALLY required to allow independent ISPs to get local loop access to their OWN customers at the same speed... and should pay AT&T the exact same monthly provisioning charges that AT&T's "official" DSL ISP pays. Ditto, for cable and
This is a case where a problem is being solved by law vice technical means.
Consumers should vote with their money. If ISP#1 is throttling, then stop subscribing. No other ISPs in the area? Get satellite access.
That approach, while very commendable and principled, isn't enough.
I've written elsewhere about why this is the case [imagicity.com], but in a nutshell it comes down to this: Net Neutrality is a basic precondition to an end-to-end network like the Internet.
Think of it as a law. It is, actually, if you read th
The government's already in there, by granting regional monopolies to telcos. In their defense, the last mile is a natural monopoly - you really don't want five different companies all digging up your property to lay their cables. The problem is, the government has granted this monopoly, which puts the telcos outside normal market forces, and then not bothered to keep a check on them. So the telcos have monopoly powers bestowed on them, with no governmental restraints. Economic theory basically guarantees t
Is that why Canada is 3rd in the world in broadband adoption and the US is 13th? Canada's government regulation of Bell Canada has had a direct impact on driving down the cost of high-speed internet (actual high-speed, not FCC-defined "high-speed"), while the US's deregulation has had a direct impact of limiting choice and increasing the costs for the American consumer. You keep banging the "government = bad" drum if you want. Good luck surfing Freenet at 2Mbps for $50 a month.
Which is the problem. The CRTC says that Bell must provide access to DSL wholesalers who them provide their own access to the internet. Bell started throttling their own service (Bell Sympatico) so customers started going to these wholesalers who buy access at the DSLAM level. Bell then started throttling the wholesalers at the DSLAM preventing them from providing a better service than Bell. This is the important issue because it shows that Bell doesn't want to upgrade the infrastructure, it wants to kill a
Especially in a market dominated by a very small number of giants. When there's no competition, there's no way for consumers to vote with their wallets other than to do without internet access entirely.
I'm fortunate to live in an area where there are *two* competing monolithic ISP's, but if they happened to both engage in these practices I'd be hooped.
I'm fortunate to live in an area where there are *two* competing monolithic ISP's, but if they happened to both engage in these practices I'd be hooped.
Here in Ottawa I have several ISPs to choose from, which includes NCF, a local cooperative that are much cheaper and have much better service and support for real problems (as opposed to the great support for only trivial issues that big ISPs have). The problem, of course, is that NCF delivers ADSL, and they get that by leasing from, you guessed it, Bell. Indeed, all the ADSL ISPs here lease from Bell, so if Bell is doing throttling, despite my apparent choice, I actually have almost none. The only other option is to lump for cable internet with Rogers -- which isn't really a choice given how badly Rogers sucks -- and I'm betting they do throttling as well. So no choice at all.
... I already wrote to Prentice (prentice.J@parl.gc.ca) to point out that leaving consumers to face a "last mile" duopoly (Rogers and Bell in my case) is insane. If there were competition on the last mile I wouldn't be nearly as upset.
I'd invite any other Canadian "consumers" who have traffic shaping on their "last mile", to do the same!
Laying last mile cable is very expensive - I'd guess there's no law saying someone couldn't lay cable and compete it's just they'd have to charge 10* as much to get their investment back. In the UK we have much the same situation, with BT owning nearly all of the last mile cable (and the cable companies have said they can't afford to build any more cable, so most parts of the country can't get that and may never do). BT is under heavy regulation so that must offer access to that at competitive rates equally
Yes, the situation is the same here, except that they are doing traffic shaping on the last mile. Last mile however goes a little further than you state because while the wholesale ISP has infrastructure at a Bell Canada exchange, traffic has to go through copper wires, then through Bell servers to the exchange where the wholesale equipment is located (even if it happens to be at the same exchange, as data off lines is aggregated at a Bell server somewhere). We can purchase DSL from other ISPs, but they rel
While I wouldn't be so hasty to jump on the conservative hate-wagon, I have to agree that Mr. Jim Prentice is a gigantic waste of governmental space. The man has proven time and time again that he serves only the interests of big business, and in his tenure in office hasn't done a single thing for us consumers. If this was my country I'd have the man tried for treason - he's failing to represent not only his constituents, but ALL constituents in Canada.
Actually, in my business life, I'm part of "big/medium business". My business interests generally align with my personal interests. So far I've seen little evidence that Mr. Prentice has taken my comments seriously, either from a business or a personal perspective, so I wouldn't say it is because he is all for big business.
While I was formerly an active PC member, I have no interest in this Conservative Party. They aren't making friends even in places they should be.
Funny you refer to the Liberals as "spend-spend-spend". They were the ones who brought in balanced budgets for many years (although much credit should go to the PCs for setting the groundwork and taxation (and biting the bullet) on this initially) and the Conservatives have done some of the dumbest things with our money I've seen, for political optics. Reducing the GST instead of reducing income taxes (everywhere else in the world it is recognized this is a poor move for the economy)is perhaps the dumbest m
This is one of (many) places where conservative economic/free market politics just don't work.
While the right wing economists tout the free market as the solution to everything, arguing that an unregulated market is the only way to approach pretty much everything, there are cases where the market is dominated by 1/2/3 players that cannot be avoided. We, as consumers, are not able to vote with our dollars - we have no choice. We did have a choice - Bell was allowing ISPs to resell DSL and manage the data themselves, but when they realized that meant that people (who know/care about such things) were flocking to the unrestricted ISPs, they squashed that avenue to unrestricted net access.
The other competitor, Rogers, hasn't opened their network up to competition (that i know of), so they can do whatever they feel like.
That leaves us with the occasional small wireless isp with leases lines, satellite (slow), or of course, leasing our own line. Yes - we have options, but no, none of them are good for the consumer. Without government regulation, and with the small size of our market (ie: very little competition), the few major ISPs will control our destinies, and it's only a matter of time until they start with tiered data speed.
Web - sure, fast as you'd like, it's highly compressible, proxyable, no big deal. Email - sure, but you can only have small attachments, but we'd prefer you use our free webmail service. Music? Only if you buy from our store (or from stores that we have deals with), otherwise, we're going to filter you. Otherwise, we'll limit you. Video? Only if you buy from our store (or from stores we have deals with). Otherwise, no bandwidth for you. Overall data? Sure, your unlimited plan will apply, if you shop in our stores. Otherwise, here's a cap. enjoy!
I think the real problem is that Bell/Rogers/etc have been severely overselling their networks without paying the money to upgrade them. Our monthly fees have been slowly creeping up instead of dropping (you'd think I could get high speed internet for cheaper now than I did 10 years ago, but you'd be wrong, for the same level of service). Our connection quality has been dropping. The service level at the ISPs is consistently poor. However, Rogers and Bell are turning out huge profits every quarter. Why? Because they've managed to find a way to provide the minimum of service for the maximum of profit, and their shareholders love it. And ultimately, in todays world, the shareholder is the more important measure of a business than their customers. So long as the share prices stay up, the businesses will continue to do whatever they want. Once the prices start to slip, and they will, or once a better level of competition is introduced/forced, then we might see customer focus becoming a priority.
There are some that say any regulation in business is bad for the economy, that we should let businesses set their policies, and the customers will go where they feel is best. But when there are no reasonable choices, when there is no competition, then the customer loses and big business wins. The government must step in and regulate, until such time as market conditions exist to enable the free market to take a go at managing themselves again.
Positive reinforcement hasn't worked so far, it's time for negative reinforcement. Bad doggy, no treat for you.
You're right, of course, but it would take a colossal amount of capital. This is where we run into the last mile issue: unless you're willing to dig up people's lawns and put in hard connections to people's houses, or you find some way to deliver wireless in a reliable and affordable way, you're stuck going through Bell's or Rogers' connections, and we're back to square one.
Bell's lines were built with support from public funding. It's time for the public to step in and say, "We've all paid for this; we s
The industry minister's response is like saying in the controversy concerning battles at the arena, the Industry Minister said "we will continue to leave the matter between the Christians on the one hand and the lions on the other".
You canadians are all alike... (Score:2, Interesting)
Does that only strike me as having come straight out of a South Park episode?
Re:You canadians are all alike... (Score:5, Insightful)
CANADA:
What will likely happen is that Rogers (the consumer) will located a new ISP provider that will not throttle their bandwidth and then say, "Goodbye Bell". That's how the free market works.
We vote with our dollars.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Who are you to make that judgment call? What you call "waste" I might call "useful". I repeat: Don't be elitist and decide what should or should not exist on the web.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
What will likely happen is that Teksaavy (the consumer) will located a new ISP provider that will not throttle their bandwidth and then say, "Goodbye Bell". That's how the free market works.
We vote with our dollars.
Re:You canadians are all alike... (Score:5, Insightful)
The free market works great, when there's competition. But there's no competition going on here. Little guys like teksavvy only exist because Bell is mandated to lease their lines.
Parent
There *are* no other ISP providers. (Score:5, Insightful)
First of all, Bell owns pretty much all the lines, the "last mile" required for any ADSL connection. That leaves pretty much Roger's as their only major competition, as they are a cable-internet provider (they are not a consumer).
There are many other ISP's that offer ADSL services, but they all use Bell lines, and the big issue currently is that Bell is throttling the traffic of their customers. Many of these companies, such as my own provider - Teksavvy - offer reasonable and good service, and have been quite vocal about how Bell is interfering with their services.
So really, the only choice other than Bell is... well.. Rogers. Unfortunately Roger's has a lack of affordable premium options (static IP's, etc), also throttles, port-blocks, and is in general known for service no better than Bell.
That means that:
viable options for the average consumer = 0
The saddest part is that Bell is still getting a cut from all the companies that are leasing lines to provide ADSL service, while doing almost nothing themselves. I would know, because as I've mentioned before, I'm on an ADSL connection that is craptastically slow due to the fact that Bell has overextended the connection to their CO, rather than adding a local repeater/node.
The only other option I could think of would be the local hydro company's (in Toronto at least) wireless offerings, but unfortunately those only work in certain areas, and mine isn't one of them (I've heard that the service is fairly decent though).
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
- Bell which is lower in price, but throttles the bandwidth due to limited cable availability.
- Rogers which is higher in price, but uses that higher cost to buy extra cables & doesn't need to throttle.
- (Are you sure there's no third company? Like AT&T or Sprint or MCI?)
-
So you see Teksaavy DOES have options. Each of these 2 choices has a drawback (throttling on one hand; higher price on the other), but that's life in a nutshell. You have to weigh the p
Re: (Score:2)
So where do you get this notion that teksavvy can get better service from Rogers?
Re: (Score:3)
What you goddammed fuckingly terminally stupid yankees fail to get with your pigheadedly assinine fear of whatever the government decides to do is that there cannot be a free market when the last mile is totally unregulated private property.
You yanks are so fucking blinded by your cultural hangups against the governme
Re:You canadians are all alike... (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean a few selected stores selling a small selection of goods to a price that's marginally lower than in the real world, without any possible competition at all since the airport decides who should be allowed to sell?
Sounds pretty much like what we'd get without net neutrality, and what the big telcos would like to see.
Parent
What the hell. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:What the hell. (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:What the hell. (Score:4, Interesting)
I think the fine print usually equates to putting on a really thick winter coat under a bulletproof vest; yeah, it's technically extra protection, but if you're at the point where you need it, barring a miracle, you're probably already screwed. You can put anything in a contract, but if it says that you don't have to support your other obligations within the contract, it won't stand.
IANAL and I only took 1 business law class in high school, so I'm more than likely wrong.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Net neutrality is a different debate entirely.
Re:What the hell. (Score:5, Insightful)
In a society where all our treated equally under the law, such a distinction cannot be made.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
That's the problem withh p2p protocols like bittorrrent. They essentially exploit the fact that the more streams you have the more bandwidth you get, thus (depending on how you look at it) either making their download have higher priority or make yours have a lower priority.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Segmented TCP transfers such as with download managers should not be, with modern TCP stacks, normally faster than single ones except in cases of major packet loss (in which case the network is already screwed).
Bittorrent is dependent on lots of other networks; it goes slower than a single TCP transfer from a fast network.
Thanks to mo
Re:What the hell. (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You're missing the real problem. I'm gonna pull numbers out of my ass, because I have sinus problems and pulling them out my nose right now would prove impractical. If net company X has a total of 100M of ban
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
The idea of traffic grooming is fine as long as the customer knows what he is buying into. Most customers wouldn't know bandwidth grooming from overbooking & this is why it happens.
If they did know, if they were made aware of the fact that their spanking new DSL advertised at XKb/s is worth X/10 worth of their favourite content, they'd likely choose alternatives --
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
http [nowtoronto.com]
Re: (Score:2)
you poor sod (Score:2)
Govt Regulation == Bad (Score:4, Insightful)
Much like the SPAM problem, you'll never be able to legislate the Internet.
Consumers should vote with their money. If ISP#1 is throttling, then stop subscribing. No other ISPs in the area? Get satellite access.
In the mean time, engineers should start working on things like TOR, Freenet, and encryption to ensure that the content on the wires stays free.
In any event, if you allow government to make inroads into what can and can't be legislated online, pretty soon, they'll legislate everything.
This is one Pandora's Box that should not be opened.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Only recently was I able
Re:Govt Regulation == Bad (Score:5, Insightful)
How are they going to vote with their wallet? No matter what they choose, they're supporting sub-standard internet. This seems to me a case in which the ISPs need to be regulated because they have a monopoly.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That approach, while very commendable and principled, isn't enough.
I've written elsewhere about why this is the case [imagicity.com], but in a nutshell it comes down to this: Net Neutrality is a basic precondition to an end-to-end network like the Internet.
Think of it as a law. It is, actually, if you read th
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
mod this Anonymous Coward UP (Score:2)
Government Regulation isn't always bad... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm fortunate to live in an area where there are *two* competing monolithic ISP's, but if they happened to both engage in these practices I'd be hooped.
Re:Government Regulation isn't always bad... (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Strike! (Score:3, Funny)
Writing to Prentice (Score:2)
I'd invite any other Canadian "consumers" who have traffic shaping on their "last mile", to do the same!
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
In the UK we have much the same situation, with BT owning nearly all of the last mile cable (and the cable companies have said they can't afford to build any more cable, so most parts of the country can't get that and may never do). BT is under heavy regulation so that must offer access to that at competitive rates equally
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
We can purchase DSL from other ISPs, but they rel
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
While I was formerly an active PC member, I have no interest in this Conservative Party. They aren't making friends even in places they should be.
Re: (Score:3)
Reducing the GST instead of reducing income taxes (everywhere else in the world it is recognized this is a poor move for the economy)is perhaps the dumbest m
Conservative economics and internet access (Score:5, Insightful)
While the right wing economists tout the free market as the solution to everything, arguing that an unregulated market is the only way to approach pretty much everything, there are cases where the market is dominated by 1/2/3 players that cannot be avoided. We, as consumers, are not able to vote with our dollars - we have no choice. We did have a choice - Bell was allowing ISPs to resell DSL and manage the data themselves, but when they realized that meant that people (who know/care about such things) were flocking to the unrestricted ISPs, they squashed that avenue to unrestricted net access.
The other competitor, Rogers, hasn't opened their network up to competition (that i know of), so they can do whatever they feel like.
That leaves us with the occasional small wireless isp with leases lines, satellite (slow), or of course, leasing our own line. Yes - we have options, but no, none of them are good for the consumer. Without government regulation, and with the small size of our market (ie: very little competition), the few major ISPs will control our destinies, and it's only a matter of time until they start with tiered data speed.
Web - sure, fast as you'd like, it's highly compressible, proxyable, no big deal.
Email - sure, but you can only have small attachments, but we'd prefer you use our free webmail service.
Music? Only if you buy from our store (or from stores that we have deals with), otherwise, we're going to filter you. Otherwise, we'll limit you.
Video? Only if you buy from our store (or from stores we have deals with). Otherwise, no bandwidth for you.
Overall data? Sure, your unlimited plan will apply, if you shop in our stores. Otherwise, here's a cap. enjoy!
I think the real problem is that Bell/Rogers/etc have been severely overselling their networks without paying the money to upgrade them. Our monthly fees have been slowly creeping up instead of dropping (you'd think I could get high speed internet for cheaper now than I did 10 years ago, but you'd be wrong, for the same level of service). Our connection quality has been dropping. The service level at the ISPs is consistently poor. However, Rogers and Bell are turning out huge profits every quarter. Why? Because they've managed to find a way to provide the minimum of service for the maximum of profit, and their shareholders love it. And ultimately, in todays world, the shareholder is the more important measure of a business than their customers. So long as the share prices stay up, the businesses will continue to do whatever they want. Once the prices start to slip, and they will, or once a better level of competition is introduced/forced, then we might see customer focus becoming a priority.
There are some that say any regulation in business is bad for the economy, that we should let businesses set their policies, and the customers will go where they feel is best. But when there are no reasonable choices, when there is no competition, then the customer loses and big business wins. The government must step in and regulate, until such time as market conditions exist to enable the free market to take a go at managing themselves again.
Positive reinforcement hasn't worked so far, it's time for negative reinforcement. Bad doggy, no treat for you.
$0.02 CDN.
Business opportunity (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Thanks, Jim (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)