Survey Finds Canadians Support Net Neutrality Law

An anonymous reader writes "A new public opinion survey conducted in Canada finds overwhelming public support in that country for net neutrality legislation. Three-quarters of Canadians believe the government should pass a law to confirm the right of Internet consumers to access publicly available Internet applications and content of their choice — even though most of those surveyed did not know the term 'net neutrality.' The survey was commissioned by eBay." Of course the devil is in the wording. Given the survey's sponsorship, it's unlikely that respondents were presented with examples of the value that ISPs say packet shaping can bring, or asked to weigh such against net neutrality.

Comments

And if you care too

[Anonymous Coward]

You can go sign the petition at http://www.neutrality.ca/

Re: Right?

[Rakishi]

Build your own damn network. Effectively illegal in a number of places where government sponsored monopolies are the only option. furthermore many of these networks were paid for by taxes to various extents making them effectively partially the property of the government.

Re:Ok

[grcumb]

Sounds good. So then let's take a situation some years in the future where it's law. What happens when you are watching TV, and all of a sudden the stream starts stuttering. You call your cable company angry. They explain that TV is now delivered over IP, like everything else. Currently you have some neighbours hitting the P2P really heavy and it is using up enough of the segment that it is interfering with video traffic. They'd love to have video have a higher QoS, but alas the law says they can't. The "contents of your packets are none of their business."

I know you're just responding to the GP, who is off the mark as well, but can we please get something straight: Net Neutrality is not about traffic shaping!

These silly digressions are really aggravating. We need to be clear about the problem, and we're not. So let's try to keep this topic simple:

If you believe that people should only pay once for Internet, then you support Net Neutrality. If you think telcos have a right to charge twice for the same service, then you're against it.

The Net Neutrality Debate [sic] is about letting telcos decide which providers get preferential service, based either on corporate allegiance or on the provider's ability to pay whatever the extortion rate du jour is.

Anybody who knows anything about multi-user networks knows that some amount of traffic shaping is necessary. While the GP and I probably agree that less is more, there is no real-world scenario in which no QoS occurs. The telcos want us to focus on this red herring, precisely because they know they can win this argument.

But if we could just stop our collective knee from jerking for a moment, we could consider what is really proposed:

Google wants to provide the world with search-related services. To that end, they pay gobzillions of dollars for state of the art data centres with tubes so big that even Ted Stevens couldn't comprehend them. The consumer wants state of the art Internet services, of which quick and easy searching is a pretty significant part. So consumer goes to telco and subscribes for X megabits at Y dollars per month.

So Google have paid for their Internet access. Consumers pay for their access. But telco's still feeling hungry. The Lear jet's in the shop and baby needs a new silver spoon. So they go to Google and say, "It's going to cost you Z dollars per megabyte that you transmit to our consumers. If you don't want to pay, that's okay, we'll just throttle your service and let Yahoo! through quicker."

Consumer never sees this. All that consumer sees is that Google is 'slow' and Yahoo! is 'fast'.

Ultimately, what we're looking at is a situation where telcos aren't satisfied with Y dollars per month from the consumer, and gobzillions more from Google. They want to charge Google more for the right to access their particular bunch of consumers.

There is nothing morally, ethically or even legally right about this model. Telcos know this, so they're lobbying governments around the world to make it legal. The problem that we face is that consumers will never actually see the effect of this legislation, if it ever passes. The only people who will know that things could be different are the geeks. And for all anyone cares, we'll simply be a voice in the wilderness.