Net Neutrality Debate Intensifies In Canada

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."

What the hell.

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??

Re:What the hell.

But isn't this sort of thing traditionally covered in the fine print of the contract?

Re:What the hell.

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. ;)

Re:

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-torrentin

Re:What the hell.

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.

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Whatever I'm doing is always more important than whatever the other guy is doing...

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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 moder

Re:What the hell.

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?

Govt Regulation == Bad

This is a case where a problem is being solved by law vice technical means.

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.

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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 choo

Re:Govt Regulation == Bad

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.

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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

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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 gover

Re:

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

Government Regulation isn't always bad...

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.

Re:Government Regulation isn't always bad...

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.

Strike!

The solution is easy... Canada should go on strike! To get more! More money! Like like, Internet money! Yeah that's it!

Conservative economics and internet access

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.

$0.02 CDN.

Thanks, Jim

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".

Re:You canadians are all alike...

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.

We vote with our dollars.

There *are* no other ISP providers.

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).

Re:You canadians are all alike...

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.

Re:You canadians are all alike...

The net should be like an airport duty free

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.

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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

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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 tenur