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Canadian ISPs Speak Out Against Net Neutrality
Ars Technica reports on a proceeding being held by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission regarding net neutrality. They requested comments from the public as part of the debate, and several Canadian ISPs took the opportunity to explain why they think it's a bad idea. Quoting:
"One of the more interesting responses came from an ISP called Videotron, which told the CRTC that controlling access to content ... 'could be beneficial not only to users of Internet services but to society in general.' As examples of such benefits, Videotron mentioned the control of spam, viruses, and child pornography. It went on to suggest that graduated response rules — kicking users off the 'Net after several accusations of copyright infringement — could also be included as a benefit to society in general. ... Rogers, one of Canada's big ISPs, also chimed in and explained that new regulations might limit its ability to throttle P2P uploads, which it does at the moment. 'P2P file sharing is designed to cause network congestion,' says the company. 'It contributes significantly to latency, thereby making the network unreliable for certain users at periods of such congestion.'"
Anyone who's dealt with Videotron before recognizes their double speak. They have a long history of draconian practices such as capping the bandwidth of their users at a very low level, preventing the use of *any* sort of server, charging $50 per static IP you request, etc.
They go out of their way to rip off their users and then try to impose the same draconian measures on their competitors in order to discourage users from jumping ship. The same applies to Bell.
The Canadian government should outlaw any one company from owning *both* the infrastructure and service components of media services. Right now Bell is abusing their monopoly on phone lines to lock competitors out of the ADSL space and Videotron monopolizes its control of cable lines to lock competitors out of the TV space.
No. Net Neutrality ensures no discrimination based on traffic source or destination. This has nothing to do with Quality of Service filtering, which is discrimination based on traffic type. They can still throttle my P2P all they like, they just can't throttle my access to YouTube because YouTube didn't pony up some "high traffic site fee".
http://www.saveournet.ca/ for supporting net neutrality in Canada.
I think this illustrates how few people understand how consumer broadband works.
The reason consumer broadband is so cheap is that bandwidth is actually shared in pools of people. It's not like having a business-class connection where you have dedicated lines, a guaranteed speed (ie. 1.5MB/s per person), and the price to reflect it.
Consumer broadband is different. Allocate 50MBs to a pool of people, and cap each person at 5MB/s. With casual net usage, that's not a problem. Games are low in bandwidth, and web surfing produces sporadic spikes of intense bandwidth usage. At 50MB/s, you could get maybe a thousand simultaneous users. They all download their pages at blazing speeds, and have low latency on their games. Because its shared, the price is cheap too.
But if you introduce something like bittorrent into that consumer broadband usage model, then we have a problem. Because now, it only takes a relative few to clog up the entire allocated 50MB/s.
ISPs like Rogers who used pool resources are now faced with a dilemma: how you maintain speeds for everyone, while keeping the price low - for everyone? They've chosen to throttle connections. Is it right? Perhaps not.
But it's important to understand that the issue is just not as black and white as some would like it to be. I'm for net neutrality, in terms of being blind to who the end IP is. I don't want Site X to be slower because they didn't pay Rogers a premium. However, I'm not against traffic shaping high-bandwidth services. If you want the bandwidth so bad, then pay for a line with guaranteed speeds.
Videotron (Quebecor) pretty much *is* the media company. A branch of it anyway.
And I saw people wonder why the local media wasn't picking up on this around here. Quebecor owns half the press and TV channels.
Mind the frickin' laser...
No it's not. Bad analogy. Actually horrid analogy. As bad as the famous ted stevens dump trucks and tubes idea.
Roads are considered "public" because they are paid for with public funds. If a company somehow was able to own 100 miles of land and build a nice freeway on it with their own money, they certainly could charge whatever they want to whoever they want. And subscriber-only lanes would be totally legal.
Certainly some network pipes are bought and paid for with taxpayer dollars. But a lot of trunks are real investments on the part of the telcos. Granted there is a certain amount of government-granted monopoly status going on here... there are only so many right of ways, etc.
The real issue involves dishonest double-dipping. ISPs and telcos want to charge you twice for everything you do, and charge companies like Google twice as well. They also want the right to sell you what purports to be connection you can transmit any kind of data on, and then turn around and intentionally slow certain kinds of traffic, or charge you more for certain kinds of data. Kickbacks from companies willing to pay to get their content delivered faster are then given an artificial advantage over others. This behavior might be barely legal, depending on racketeering laws, but certainly isn't ethical.