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Canadians Organizing a Rally For Net Neutrality
taylortbb writes "Canadians are fighting back against Bell Canada's traffic shaping (recentlly discussed by Slashdot here and here) by organizing a rally in support of network neutrality. The rally is being backed by a long list of organizations including Google, two major political parties, three ISPs, and two major unions. It's set for Tuesday at 11:30am on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. The only question that remains is, will the government listen?"
Oh - come on. You know it's one of the first things you thought of too.
We thought we could make money on the Internet. But while the Internet is new and exciting for creative people, it hasn't matured as a distribution mechanism to the extent that one should trade real and immediate opportunities for income for the promise of future online revenue. It will be a few years before digital distribution of media on the Internet can be monetized to an extent that necessitates content producers to forgo their fair value in more traditional media.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
sounds great and all, but not all of us can pack up and head to ottawa everytime these issues need to be brought forth, would not these demonstrations carry more weight if they were occuring in multiple venues simultaneously?
the blocking ISP as operating under Bush orders to weaken canadian economy. Then, the government will not just listen but act ;-)
They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me. -Nathaniel Lee
"The only question that remains is, will the government listen?"
Are there any elections scheduled in the near future?
YES: eventually the gevornment will listen. but only if they see the broadband/filesharing-voter block is big enough.
NO: erm. will a deaf monkey recite shakespeare?
Canada on strike!
Here come the shills that are going to say that if the Telcos and the DRM makers and the content providers aren't allowed to censor to their hearts content, and sue everyone who downloads music, the whole Western World will collapse and China will make us all be communist or some bullshit.
I hate shills. I hate them. You know what? I want the IP economy to collapse. These people deserve it.
I have now received some information regarding Bell Canada and your email about their engagement in anti-competitive behaviour by controlling or "shaping" of traffic of independent Internet Service Providers (ISPs) that provide service through wholesale access to Bell's digital subscriber line (DSL) network from Industry Canada. I hope that this helps.
As you may be aware, consumer Internet services are not regulated by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), as it has found this market to be sufficiently competitive to protect the interests of users. Indeed, the competition between telephone and cable networks, as well as satellite, wireless, and other players, has ensured Canadians have a variety of choices in terms of both price and quality when selecting an ISP.
The Competition Bureau ensures that prices in all sectors of the economy, except those that are regulated, are set by market forces and are not the result of anti-competitive behaviour. Under the abuse of dominance provisions of the Competition Act, it is illegal for a dominant firm to be engaging in a practice of anti-competitive acts resulting in a substantial lessening of competition, including disciplining or targeting competitors in order to raise prices or reduce customer choice. Since Bell is engaging in traffic "shaping" across its network-in other words, providing the same service to both its own customers and to independent ISPs-it does not appear that Bell is currently engaging in a practice of anti-competitive acts contrary to the Act.
The CRTC does regulate wholesale access by independent ISPs to high-speed Internet access services from both telephone and cable companies. Under the CRTC's regulatory framework for wholesale services, Bell is required to provide access to their DSL network to independent ISPs at regulated rates and terms of service. If the CRTC finds Bell or any other network operator to be in violation of these terms or otherwise engaging in unjust discrimination or undue preference, the CRTC has the power to address these issues under the Telecommunications Act.
Should you believe carriers are engaging in unjust discrimination and undue preference, I encourage you to contact the CRTC at 1-877-249-2782 or by e-mail at info@crtc.gc.ca. Please note that the Canadian Association of Internet Providers has made an application on this basis to the CRTC requesting to resolve this issue.
Sincerely,
Carolyn
Carolyn Brown - Administrator - Constituency Office
David Sweet MP - Ancaster Dundas Flamborough Westdale
If we put Government in charge of the Internet we will never stop them from imposing their will on us through it.
The internet can not be any more neutral than when it is left to markets.
The problem with it at the moment, is it is already too regulated in most countries. (Eg, the US)
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Seriously this is not about putting the government in charge, its about allowing the internet to remain open. How in the world would it be more neutral if the markets get their way? The markets are proving they can not stay neutral, they want more money without doing any work such as upgrading infrastructure. Obviously, they can't stay neutral because they will always choose what makes them more money, thats not neutral. If the government steps in and says "quit messing with the traffic that goes through the tubes" that will force them to stay neutral.
Really, not everything the government does is this horrible plot to enslave humanity and yes, corporations step out of line from time to time and need to be slapped back down. This is a perfect example of such a time.
Traffic shaping and deep packet inspection are nothing new for some Canadians. Close to three years ago I canceled my Rogers Cable Internet service because they were using deep packet inspection to throttle torrent traffic. I hate the restrictions, and hope that the CRTC will implement a rule for Net Neutrality, but the chances of this happening are next to nil. I'd like to say that people should cancel their service with these providers and move to a less restrictive service, but the number of choices available for open ISPs in Canada is shrinking every day. The ISP I switched to Storm was recently bought out by a larger carrier ExplorNet, and my fear is that my service will see changes as well. The only thing we can hope for, truely is that Michael Geist can defend our right to a Internet devoid of the restrictions and practices that the major ISP are forcing their paying subscribers to live by.
Im sure some people who identify with this message deep in their hearts will take issue with this, and attack it or mock it, as it hurts them to face reality and their sad situation, but:
The stupid, fat, lazy, and brainwashed Americans will continue to take it in the ass. You could have $50 a gallon gas prices and people would complain, they would post to their blog and make videos for YouTube. They would bitch, moan, walk into stores and wring their fists at other Americans working retail and day-to-day service jobs and take it verbally out on them like they do today, instead of confronting the issue together. With Katrina we saw the reality which bubbles underneath the masturbatory Hollywood America. The television continues to control the minds and the people parrot back and forth whatever the television says, usually with a tiny opinion of their own, but little more.
They dont think, they are trained to consume, what they are given they accept and they dont challenge authority, they are mentally beaten and assaulted with powerful advertising on a daily basis and are so used to it they often mix commercial content and slogans or jingles in with their daily lifes communication.
Nothing will improve unless the people turned off their televisions, stopped parroting, stopped blogging about their ingrown toenail and how much they hate choice A and B and how terrible everything is and how they continue to FUND the issues they hate while they bitch about it and do NOTHING.
Unless you get together, turn off your televisions, stop being programmed by the rich corporations and political deviants, you arent going to change. Your system is constructed to contain you in a cage. You can disagree and feel you are somehow different, but if you are paying taxes and doing nothing to change the system, you are as broken, immoral, and to blame as the ones who commit the evils you claim to despise.
Raise the gas prices to $100 a gallon, raise the milk to $30 a gallon, it wont matter, the Americans will do nothing, they will continue to sit back while their taxes pay for drones to fly and spot marijuana so the DEA can continue busting non violent pot smokers and lady justice can throw them in jail to get violently sodomized and forced to suck gang members pensies and maybe leave jail with a nice disease, rather than get together, switch off corporate television, and think for themselves and shape their nation with their own minds.
No, they will continue to go to Youtube and post stupid videos of them sharing their thoughts about things they hate which their taxes continue to fund, post blogs about their stupid lives which fund the system they hate, and talk about choices A and B which are parties which are not people friendly, but corporate friendly.
You are fucked, and you will continue to deny it. When faced with the facts you will either (A) Ignore it, (B) Mock it, (C) Argue it, (D) Launch personal attacks, (E) remain in denial, (F) Lace it with humor, (G) Or another cowardly response.
Enjoy your mess.
This story is just begging for the tag CanadaOnStrike
Canadaaaaaa on striiiiiike.
From the Dept. of Redundancy Dept.: Check out the directions to Ottawa they provide - from Windsor, Kitchener, and Toronto. All of them are on the same highway (the mighty 401), and to the west of Ottawa. D'oh!
Corporations make value judgements on what provides them with profit while providing their customers with service. This means if people want neutrality, they need only change providers.
However, there are restrictions in certain regions on which providers you can go to because these providers have been given a monopoly.
This is the problem with the American market, a lot of these companies have been given monopoly, and so you have no choice.
Additionally, since their profit model is setup around providing this neutrality, they will not be as profitable as before, and so they will have an argument to levy taxes or give them a greater monopoly.
Further more, their businesses are doing this so they can provide the unlimited plans you enjoy. If their hands are tied, it is likely you will get plans that are limited in other ways.
So lets go over this...
Instead of deregulating and having a choice, you choose more regulation which will most likely have little effect anyway, narrow your choices and increase your average costs?
Does that about sum it up?
Business is not stupid, no matter what it will be profitable, the only variable left is whether you want the ability to choose?
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I think the government will listen. They might not act, but they will listen (while trying to ignore).
Rallies like this usually get a good amount of attention. Furthermore, there is some political backing (check out the speaker list) and there has already been a lot of coverage for this rally before it has begun. Plus, being on the Hill, it draws a lot of public attention from newspapers, local workers, etc.. Every time a protest comes through the downtown core, I can hear it and always wonder what it's about.
So even if the government does nothing immediately, which is expected, this rally has already been extremely successful at bringing the issue to the Canadian public. This is all over the news and will be throughout the day. I would call that a success already.
For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.
This type of free market thinking sounds attractive at first, but in reality it's proving to be anything but. The problem is that the big telecom corporations aren't playing fair. They are trying to impose the same restrictions on consumers across the board in order to create a corporate-favourable landscape where they dictate the rules, and not the consumer. The mentality that 'the market will fix itself' works only if you assume that each market player is out to differentiate themselves from their competition with better prices, better service, etc. If every area had a few reasonably sized regional corporations with consumer bases that were roughly equivalent, it might work. We're in the situation now where we have a few national corporations, each with millions of customers. Dropping one to go to another is hardly noticed, and many people don't have the technical knowledge to *know* they're getting screwed. You're not going to get any sort of market movement in that environment.
Up here in Canada, we have Bell, Rogers and a few other regional ISPs (Videotron, EastLink). It's not a 'healthy' landscape, but it's far from a monopoly situation. None of them are differentiating themselves with regards to traffic shaping, net neutrality, etc. because they know that, while it's good for the consumer, it's NOT good for them. Not because it will cause them to go out of business, but it means that they stand to make less profit than they would otherwise.
They have their lobbyists in government as well, and you can believe that they're trying to 'regulate' themselves a corporation-friendly environment. Getting the CRTC involved here gives customers a single place to voice their concerns, and hopefully in the end what will emerge is a compromise between fairness to consumers, and the freedom of corporations to make healthy (but not exorbitant) profits.
net neutrality won't mean a god damn if net privacy tools and net privacy in general are completely destroyed by canada's participation with ACTA.
Maybe they should be frying both fish in the same pan here?
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
ISP routers are private property.
\u262D = \u5350
The people who don't *know* they are getting screwed, obviously it doesn't impact their lives that much, else they would know.
The definition of strategy in business is to generate a competitive advantage through differentiation/cost/focus, or a mix of the 3.
If we had a free market (Which we don't), competition would force each of the players to provide the greatest value to their customers possible.
When you assume that all telecom corporations would act they way you are describing what you're really saying is "There is some other reason why these businesses are forced to operate this way".
By addressing the problem at the ISP level you aren't addressing the ISPs problems, which is most likely cost at every growing bandwidth requirements.
Since you are proposing to limit their ability to offer plans which suit their customers, they will inherently be incurring more costs.
When you increase the marginal cost curve for a company, you are shifting the equilibrium of supply in demand which will generally result in a higher price and less quantity.
Additionally, "good for the consumer" is relative. My grand mother doesn't care about shaping or prioritization, she just wants her email.
On Slashdot it is our lifeblood, and so we often make the assumption that other people would like the quality we would like at the price point we offer, however this ignores the needs of other.
Are you willing to say "Lets increase the price and decrease the amount of people using the service, so that we can possibly (it's not definite) have a higher quality service"
Because that is what you are saying with regulation such as this.
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The Canadians could try going on strike.
Let's try that another way...
Instead of having neutrality laws that companies have to obey, which would (in theory) protect smaller companies and prevent monopolies, you'd rather have no regulation, and leave it up to the companies to sort it out, because what's 'good' for business is 'good' for the people?
Things you are:
1. One of the "brainwashed Americans" you refer to
2. A teenager
Things you are not:
1. A gadfly
2. Fooling anyone with your sad, feeble attempt at preemptive rebuttal to criticism of your childish and ineptly-stated views
Action: Bell throttles their own traffic, blocks ports, etc, causing massive irritation/disruption to their own customers
Result: Customers leave Bell for ISP's that aren't interfering with their traffic
Action: Bell then institutes throttling and other abusive behavior against the other ISP's customers
Result: Customers have nowhere to go. Other ISP's may not lose so many customers (because there's no good alternative), but they also wouldn't gain the customers that would otherwise be coming in because of superior service.
In a nutshell, the third-party ISP's need to use Bell's infrastructure. As such, they cannot offer anything better than Bell in those regards. Their main competing points were the additional features offered that Bell was not offering (or was cutting back on), with non-throttled service being one of the key points. As Bell has removed their ability to offer such service, they have, in-fact, removed the third-party ISP's as competitors in this arena.
How is this NOT anti-competitive? Is it OK so long as it's "we're going to make everyone suck as much as us so that customers don't move elsewhere" instead of "we're going to make everyone else suck more so that customers come to us instead"
Both are equally anti-competitive and discriminatory.
yawn
Has ACTA gone through yet?
The fact that people are starting to demonstrate that "we are aware of what's going on, we're watching, and we're not happy" should give the government an idea that stupid decisions about internet and telecommunications will get a negetive reaction from voters. Perhaps it will influence them not to approve idiotic new bills or trade provisions.
Fuck , an lunatic claiming that he has the answers and other simply don't know they are being screwed ?
Fuck you are your good intentions.
Get lost.
Why couldn't they hold this rally on a weekend, when I don't have to work and have time to make the 2 hour drive to Ottawa and participate in it?
Bullshit. Off the top of my head I can come up with two simple examples of this being false: monopolies and cartels.
The truth is that a completely unregulated market is an authoritarians dream, because it would allow a small elite group of powerful people to control all capital. Humanity tried that once, it was called the "Soviet Union".
The government is pretty likely to listen on this matter. Net neutrality isn't a particularly ideological issue, though there are some interesting political issues to consider:
1. There are Liberal and NDP members of parliament attending and speaking at the rally. The Conservatives hold the most seats in the commons, however if these two other parties presented a bill on opposition day and voted as a bloc it would pass with little to no support from Conservative members, as we have a minority government situation with no established coalition.
2. The conservatives may not have officially endorsed "net neutrality" but they do not oppose it either; their policy platform is silent on the issue. However, historically the current government has been significantly more receptive to changing the CRTC's regulatory regime than the Liberals have ever been. for example the Conservatives have broght foreward regulatory changes mandating phone number portability, cellphone tower sharing and a wireless auction this month that allocates a certain amount of licenses to new entrants in the market. Bell, Telus and Rogers all protested the terms of the auction because they "interfered with the free market" (Canadian wireless is a free market? HA! Yeah, right!). Interestingly, the Liberals also denounced the auction and cellphone tower sharing provisions. The Liberals are for Net Neutrality maybe, but they have NEVER advocated "wireless neutrality" and Liberal policies have allowed the wireless market to stagnate to "third world" status. So, if the Liberals support Net Neutrality, it wouldn't be hard at all to get Prentice and oter Conservative MPs to support it.
3. Bell Canada is of course the biggest motivation for the push to net neutrality with their throttling shenanigans. Bell has been most vocal in opposing changes in regulations that favour new entrants into their markets and is also the most "vertically integrated" of the major players. They've not been very supportive of this Conservative government, and the government is not very sympathetic to their "plight" either. Because they lack effective lobbying in this government, policy is more likely to follow popular opinion rather than lobbyist opinion.
It is also important to note that even if no changes are made to reguilations that Canada has wuite a "neutral net" already. Under already implemented regulations broadband providers, by law, MUST provide identical service to their wholesalers/resellers/third parties that they offer to retail customers directly. When the Bell complaint was investigated it turned out that Bell's own end customers were subjected to the same bandwidth throttling as the wholesale/resellers were.
Bell is in fact having a difficult time in being an ISP recently. They are losing revenue badly due to very inept management decisions and because they have now got a reputation for being the poorest of all the broadband providers in Canada. Aside from the news of the throttling, there was also a newsmagazine show called "Marketplace" that looked at Bell customer complaints and did a comparison with Telus and Shaw. The results were extremely embarassing to Bell as it demonstrated that their competition was much faster, sometimes 2 or 3 times faster.
Unlike the cellphone market, ISPs are in fact more competitive in Canada, and have historically offered better service and lower prices than found in the US, so while I would very much like to see a formal "net neutrality" policy in Canada to protect what is slowly eroding competition, the situation is not nearly as bad as it is in the US.
I walked up to the Hill on my lunch break. There were 300 people or so (rough estimate), some clever signs, and media coverage - TV and newspaper.
Apparently the first batch of speakers spoke right away and were finished by the time I got there. Everyone was waiting for Mauril Belanger (liberal MP) who was expected to speak at 12:45.
At 12:40 rally organizers tried to get the crowd pumped up with cries of "Who's net? OUR NET!" and "Our net... NOT FOR SALE!". I had to go back to the office, but you could hear their shouts echoing off the buildings for a few blocks... pretty cool!
Hopefully it raises the issue to the awareness of the general public. Most people seem to have no idea whatsoever that Net Neutrality is even an issue, let alone an important one.
According to the organization, there was between three to five hundred people (it seemed less than that to me).
It was pretty tame too, but then again how noisy do you expect a few hundred computer geeks to be, let alone Canadian computer geeks?
Taken at the rally:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jwalton/2528963840/
Hm that's a harsh PS. From what I recall from my history lessons blitzkrieg is an initial concentration of heavy bombardments on a relative small region followed by mechanized infantry rushing said region.
Or as wiki describes it:
Blitzkrieg (lightning war in German;) is a popular name for an offensive operational-level military doctrine which involves an initial bombardment followed by the employment of motorized mobile forces attacking with speed and surprise to prevent an enemy from implementing a coherent defense.
Yes lets base the internet on what your grandmother needs....
Yes.
I know it is a lot more complex a notion that a system is more efficient when not regulated, but it has been proven.
What is debatable is whether or not the whole system should be less efficient for the benefit of a few.
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While it's encouraging to read that "Canadians are fighting back against Bell Canada's Net Throttling", the sad reality is that a nominal fraction of web users are the least bit concerned or affected by traffic-shaping. Having participated in Michael Geist's blog initiatives and sent ballistic missives to the CRTC under the auspices of the Canadian Campaign for Media Democracy... the sad reality is that we're looking at a 'grassroots' movement of barely twenty thousand on-line activists... as opposed to the millions of E-Bay Zombies who see the Net as nothing more than their ubiquitous Pay Pal. While the NDP's Net Neutrality bill is indeed a viable initiative towards protecting the global community of Cyberspace... it won't trigger enough collective ire to defeat The Borg's Neo-Con agenda of corporate control and bottom-line biased regulation. The only way to stop this juggernaut of corporate-controlled media concentration is by direct political constituency pressure where it actually counts, forcing an election based upon principles of transparency and voter accountability. And if that fails... 'dobe wall the Jeffe-Bastards currently reigning in our New Rome on the septic Ottawa.