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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.'"
I would prefer they elaborate on this generic "benefit for society" that comes from protecting the copyright interests of corporate entities. I don't really see how this particular item helps all of us lead better lives.
Your argument might be valid if A. you had an impressively low uid to backup your differing opinion, and B. they weren't absolutely correct. That said, a low user id doesn't mean you actually /know/ anything, just that you've been around longer; age does not necessarily correlate with sense.
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Just like that - which is why P2P traffic should be prioritised. It potentially services more people per packet.
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How about we punish corporations on accusation?
For example, three paople call in that the RIAA is evading taxes. So the police comes and seizes all their assets because they were evading taxes.
Someone calls that the ISP proposing this is commiting fraud and false advertising because they do not deliver what they promise. So, they are heavily fined for doing this withou any evidence.
After several accusations, the corporation is forced to close and the CEO is sentenced to life without parole with confiscation of all assets.
Now this would benefit the society.
What blatant misdirection! There's a huge difference between blocking spam and viruses in order to protect customers against hassle and harm, and blocking access to content because it allows you to make a buck once the content producer begs you to please stop blocking their content. Protecting customers against spam and viruses is a service; blocking content because the content provider hasn't paid you off, on the other hand, is extortion. Net Neutrality is supposed to prevent just this kind of extortion.
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Maybe we should make the tubes owned by a public company that leases lines to ISPs rather than letting Rogers, Bell and all these other companies do it.
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+2 Troll is Slashdot's way of saying groupthink is confused
Michael Geist's comments in the article pretty much strike to the heart of the matter. There are only a handful of major ISPs (which are parts of a larger media/telecomm corporation), and typically only two exist in the same community. The rest are resellers who are at the whim of the incumbent carriers.
Frankly, I think the internet should function like hydro - you get hooked up, you have a meter, and are billed for the amount you use. If you want to buy bulk bandwidth (or other extras ie email addresses, webspace, tv access), then you can go to an ISP and get those extras.
I wouldn't mind the extra taxes having a public infrastructure would incur. It's Canada after all, we're used to taxes.
You won't really see 50Mbps shared by anyone (except cable networks). More like 1000Mbps shared to hundreds or thousands of customers. You'd be surprised by how little bandwidth is actually used, except by students.
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> because they think it'll get them in good with the media companies. Videotron *is* a media company. It is tightly integrated in the Quebecor empire, the biggest media conglomerate in Quebec. Quebecor owns the biggest private TV network (TVA), the biggest newspaper (Journal de Montreal), biggest CD/DVD/etc. stores (Archambault)... Videotron itself is just a pawn. They are a tool to serve as a provider of the Empire's content, not to serve customers.
Do I have a problem with other people using p2p? Not at all. But, if you want to use a shared resource and expect to hog the entire bandwidth available, I have no sympathy. Either 1) get used to lower bandwidth, or 2) pay the extra to get dedicated bandwidth. TANSTAAFL.
But none of these issues are related to net neutrality. I don't think anyone should have to pay a premium to ensure that their sites are given priority - or even equal - access to bandwidth. I'm disappointed that so many Canadian ISP's are willing to throw in the towel; it makes me sad.
What was once true, is no longer so
How come bandwidth doesn't split exactly equally between individuals using the network? How does it happen that a bittorrent user slows down all the other users, as opposed to the other users slowing him down until everyone has exactly the same bandwidth? That seems the most equitable solution. Is it technologically unfeasible? why?
I'm not 100% sure on this, but no doubt someone with more clue will chime in if I'm wrong.
I think if you leave things to run their own way, the distribution will be "equal" but weighted by connections, not users.
Now, web pages use one or a handful of connections at most (one for the text and a few others for images - sometimes), and online gaming uses just one from the player to the server, but bittorrent opens hundreds or even thousands of connections per user (one to each peer). Every connection would be given even priority, but in terms of users, the bittorrent user is getting a weight of thousands compared to a weight of 1 for users of other protocols.
There are technological ways to fight this and the most reasonable seems to be QoS shaping, i.e. the network being configured so: "If there is plenty of vacant bandwidth, your bittorrent connections can have it all. But if a more important protocol demands some bandwidth, your bittorrent packets will be put at the end of the queue and they will be served first".
You might even set this up on your home router if you use bittorrent a lot, and also game or use VOIP telephony - so that bittorrent can run at full speed while you're asleep but gets shoved aside if you make a VOIP call, so that you can have enough bandwidth for a good quality conversation. The technology is old and is even supported now in many consumer grade routers.
Many ISPs, including (from TFS) Rogers do exactly this. What they're saying is that if in the future they're not allowed to do this, by law, then they don't know what they'll do instead.
The strongest suggestion here on /. is that one thing they could do, is stop selling a service like "20MBps unlimited" which is not supportable by their network if more than a small fraction of users actually utilise the full advertised features of the product they paid for. Instead, they could offer a service marketed as "sometimes 20MBps not really unlimited, but close enough for web pages and email and gaming" for that price, and keep the bittorrenters well appraised that "because this service isn't unlimited, really, we'll shape your downloads into oblivion - if you don't want that pay the full price for a low contention business grade connection".
The problem as I see it (although I live in Australia and am removed from the broadband situation on the North American continent) is twofold: one, that services are advertised as unlimited and they really aren't (and cannot feasibly be), which leads to all these issues of how much shaping is legal, what disclosure is required, how much overselling, etc.
Two, is that the amount of bandwidth used by plain old ma and pa customers is going up compared to 10 years ago - without bittorrent, people are watching videos on youtube, streaming TV from hulu, doing video phone chats over the net, uploading gigs of photos and videos to picasa, etc - not just downloading web pages at a few kb of text each like they used to. But, the ISPs still have the same network they did then, and even more customers than they did then as broadband becomes more prevalent.
In Australia the first problem is more or less solved, with the ACCC having successfully lobbied government to make it illegal to advertise plans with any kind of limit as "unlimited". So, they are sold as "20gb per month" with peak and off peak times clearly marked. This wasn't always so in Australia - in fact there was even a baseball cap made with the writing "I signed up for an unlimited Internet account with Telstra but all
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If it were minute by minute throttling. for a given price the ISP and I decide on a number of Kb per minute. I get and send bytes in each minute until the limit is met, then my connection stops but only until the beginning of the next minute. At any time I can go to my ISP's Website and change my setting - paying more so I get a larger number of Kb per minute. Plans should start at $9.00 a month with a number of Kb equivalent to a fast dialup connection.
I've tried the pay-per-MB download service and it's crap! You still get the same speeds and service but you pay more because you left your slow download running overnight. They should just throttle the P2P traffic and be done with it. The big telcos want to block net neutrality so they can cap people at 1GB/month of downloads and charge ridiculous prices if you go over(which everyone does). It's the same model the cell phone companies use with their 200minutes/month plans and $0.50/min thereafter. Wake up Canada, or else get used to $500 internet bills.