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."

Comments

Re:What the hell.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Thanks to modern TCP stacks, segments would not get a bigger slice of the pie under a congested network (a situation which, incidentally, should never happen if there is sufficient overhead; if you need to throttle, you need more upstream for your current contention ratio or you need to reduce your contention ratio - or stop taking on new subscribers if you don't have the capacity).

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

[Coryoth]

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.