Class Action Suit Against Bell For Throttling

doppiodave writes "Hard on the heels of the Net Neutrality bill introduced in Canada's Parliament, a class action suit was filed yesterday against Bell by Quebec's Consumers Union, asking that extensive compensation be paid to all Bell's DSL subscribers for fraudulent advertising and privacy violations. The press release is available in French. The timing of this suit coincides with several other developments that suggest Net Neutrality is finally coming to the attention of the general public and Canada's regulator, the CRTC, which recently required Bell to file responses (by May 29) to an exhaustive list of interrogatories about its traffic-shaping practices."

Comments

Re:Press release translation

[Stellian]

has installed on its network since last fall, surreptitiously, a mechanism that deliberately slows down, at peak hours, the transfer speed of its subscribers' data. Yeah, as opposed to all other ISPs in the world, where the speed actually goes up during peak hours. Or, at the very least, you connection speed is guaranteed, no matter what protocol you are using or if the other endpoint is on the other side of the world.

To inspect the users' data and manage the Internet traffic, Bell uses a technology called Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) which breaches the right to privacy of the consumers using their Internet access services. Trafic shaping and prioritization is as old as the Internet, and it's here to stay. Heck, it's even built into TCP: when the numeber of connections goes up, the average speed decreases. It's perfectly legitimate for the ISP to throttle protocols that are considered less important, or to cap the band of traffic hogs.

The "depth" of the packet inspection is rather irrelevant. For example when prioritizing DNS packets, a standard network practice, the router will do a trivial packet inspection; who is to say where the inspection becomes "deep enough" to become privacy violating ? If you are sending clear-text, or trivially obfuscated streams of data trough your ISP, I see no privacy implications if the ISP will do some automated classification of data.

What, you don't agree with the classification made by your ISP, that 90% of bittorent packets goes to /dev/null ? To bad, I guess you should have read the contract before signing it. And you can be sure the contract allows them aggressive traffic shaping, and stipulates just a maximum speed you are allowed to use, no minimal guarantees. Unless you are a business customer, and pay a premium for that guaranteed minimal bandwidth.

I can understand an accusation of false advertising, but certainly no one can ask for the money back after signing a contract allowing for traffic shaping. Aggressive traffic shaping is not welcomed by the customer, and the customer will leave, it's a simple free market exercise - just vote with your wallet, and word of mouth will do the rest.

I don't know why some think Net neutrality means everyone should be able to download at full speed 24/7 from bittorrent. What I understand by net neutrality, is that my ISP should not be allowed to make politically driven shaping, I.E. favor Metacafe over Youtube, or block access to Ron Paul's site because they negotiated a contract with it's political adversaries. Otherwise, if you don't like the service your ISP gives you, with a protocol you chose, you are free to renegotiate your contract, or switch to another provider.