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Liberal Party of Canada Comes Out In Support of Net Neutrality
bryxal writes "The Liberal Party of Canada, currently leading in most polls, has announced yesterday that it supports Net Neutrality, saying, 'Internet management should be neutral and not be permitted for anti-competitive behaviour, nor should it target certain websites, users, providers or legitimate software applications. We must protect the openness and freedom of the internet, and maintain competition to spur innovation, improve service levels and reduce costs to users.'"
Now, if Ignatieff (leader of the Liberal party) would just get his ass in gear and get a new election called so that Harper can be shown the door we could get that network neutrality into action....
Gee really? I never would have guessed!
Canada just keeps getting more and more impressive. Again, ahead of the curve on social justice. They put the US to shame.
Skype is actively blocked here in EU by many ISPs, because some big telcos and their ISP branches decided that Skype is eating too much into their pie. Skype is notorious low bandwidth app so claims of bandwidth concerns etc. are ill-founded. Canada is showing some sense and those EU drones in Brussels should do something, a constitutional amendment perhaps ?
Just like students that earn a 4.0 GPA or greater simply chose classes in which they didn't want to learn anything.
As for a political stance on pederasty, I prefer to stay neutral. Same goes for that 5 to 6 vote that favors gangrape...and the lawsuit from the people that were injurred by Captain Crunch Cereals scratching infections into the roofs of their mouths.
The "liberal" in "Liberal Party" has the traditional American meaning and is not used in the European sense. In Europe, a "liberal" is one who favors market liberalization: lower taxes, less regulation, and longer work hours. For example, France's Nicolas Sarkozy was accused of being a "liberal" when he ran in the presidential election.
GNAA? Is that you?
Lower taxes and less regulation, sure, but you cannot call a liberal (in the traditional US sense, or libertarian today) somebody who thinks that it's a matter for the government to decide what the work hours should be in private businesses.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
I wonder who gets to decide what a "Legitimate Software Application" is?
Sig: I stole this sig.
Dammit. You can plan for failure, but you can't plan for success. :P
I actually hoped it was the Liberal party of Australia that'd come out with it, although our Liberal party is (so I'm told) kinda more like the Conservatives in Canada. We're just in the process of (hopefully) having Conroy's Great Firewall of Fail thrown out as completely impracticable, so it'd be great to have a local party that recognizes that messing with the internets is bad.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Everything they say and do is opposite the conservatives. They don't care, they are just doing their jobs.
For those of you thinking of moving to canada, remember this:
If you die in Canada, you die in real life! http://xkcd.com/180/
Bell Canada is in hot water with their wholesale ISP customers because they are throttling the bandwidth from the cabinets/COs upstream. However, they are throttling both their own retail subscribers _and_ these ISP resellers. Personally, I see this as a commercial issue between the ISPs and Bell. The ISPs should have SLAs that document precisely how much bandwidth they are allowed to peak at.
However, ISPs, instead of negotiating, running their own wire, or buying their own DSLAMs have gone lobbying. They tried the regulator, who told them to get lost. They've managed to convince a lot of customers that Bell is being anti-competitive and against "Net Neutrality" by throttling. Remember, Bell applies the same shaping to their own customers.
So, everyone is hoping that this means that the Liberals are against this throttling. However, I can't see how it would have any bearing on that, since all subscribers are throttled the same.
Net Neutrality is a complex issue - where are you allowed to throttle, how are you allowed to throttle, are you allowed QoS, preferential feeds over a common connection, preferential feeds over independent connections. What's the difference between a VPN on one wire and a separate wire? Are you allowed to host local mirrors of high traffic sites? Are you allowed to charge fees for that hosting? If you're a VoIP provider as well as the ISP, are you allowed to provide preferential services? If you offer DTV, how about then? What makes a cable TV provider able to give preferential treatment to cable TV channels, but an ISP can't do it for Internet TV?
This was purely a publicity stunt without any real substance behind it. Particularly since Canada has a minority government and could be voted down at any point in time. Heck, they managed to get mentioned on slashdot - talk about hitting the target market!
I saw the same thing in New Zealand. During the election, the opposition minister was quoting as saying that the copyright legislation was stupid, and that he didn't know why he voted for it. As soon as they got in, NZ had S92A, three strikes and you're disconnected without appeal or evidence.
The Liberal Party is notorious for promising things in Opposition that they have no intention of following through with. Ultimately the Liberals will promise cash to the poor Provinces that will come out of the pockets of the rich Provinces, return to power and forget about Net Neutrality.
Classic liberal != libertarian.
Besides, "liberal" isn't binary. There's a whole range of opinions that falls into that category, and most of them are not extreme (while not regulating work hours is definitely very fringe by today measures).
And, of course, the Liberal Party of Canada - which is one of the major parties - is not extreme on any issues.
Sorry I was mistaken science is the religion and evolution is the belief system.
You lunatics never stop.
I submitted the CBC coverage of the bill: "Alberta passes law allowing parents to pull kids out of class. Written notice required when sex, sexual orientation, religion are covered." http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=4724247
I submitted it under censorship because that is what it is. You are trying to censor people from the facts to further your agenda.
If your beliefs are so rock solid then why must you always institute censorship.
Any scientist would see the inherit problem of a person graduating from biology without understanding or belief of the fact of evolution.
If you want to limit the future of your children you are doing a very good job of it. These theories are fact, whether in a biology curriculum or a gender study curriculum. Certainly parents are not setting their children up for post secondary education. What they are setting them for is hate, towards their parents. When they realize their god doesn't exist, and their whole life is a lie, they will have nobody to blame other than oppressive parents.
Aye, there's the rub.
I am the maverick of Slashdot
The guys who created it certainly seem to think so: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent,_Inc.
Is a car a "legitimate hardware appliance"? It CAN be used to kill people, you know... Not to mention airplanes...
Intellectual Property: an immaterial non-entity, most fiercely contended by those with no proper intellect to speak of.
..who are going to support the Conservatives' invasive, over-reaching legislation that will allow the RCMP to monitor our internet usage (the Investigative Powers for the 21st Century Act)? Hardly consistent supporters of freedom, privacy, and individual liberty now are they?
so it'd be great to have a local party that recognizes that messing with the internets is bad.
Actually, net neutrality legislation is messing with the internet. It's just that this is good messing for a change... probably.
Slashdot readers will remember that I was victim of medical malpractice in Québec. For anyone who would like to read my story, I posted it on ratemds.com.
Don't be surprised that the first truly large forms of Internet censorship on a large scale occur because of net neutrality legislation. Ironic.
Right now, the government is not responsible for Internet content to any real extent. A net neutrality law essentially says 'Government, you make things right about that content stuff'. At first, this will be a good thing. "No censorship" it will say. But then, the politics show their true form. Someone will say, "you can't censor child porn because of net neutrality laws". The conservatives will push through an exception that forces censorship of child porn. Think of the children. Someone will say, "you can't censor pro-tobacco messages to children because of net neutrality laws". The liberals will push through an exception to censor tobacco messages. Think of the children. Then the next thing. Then the next. The government will, over time, take it to levels that today's QOS policy for VOIP look like innocent play.
Sorry to be pessimistic, but it opens a Pandora's box. Governments love laws. Lobbyists love laws. So, the question I ask myself is: is the net neutrality problem today better or worse than the net neutrality problem we would get with a law? Hard to predict. I suspect that things are not bad enough yet to make a law a good idea.
"Internet management should be neutral and not be permitted for anti-competitive behaviour, nor should it target certain websites, users, providers or legitimate software applications."
Well put.
I would add, though.
- If the network is privately funded, not backed by public concession or right of way, this should not apply if the TOS of are clear about it.
The CRTC regulates communications in Canada and it's an arm's length agency. That is to say that the federal cabinet can't control its decisions. The Conservatives tried to force them to deregulate VOIP. The CRTC disobeyed the order. There was nothing the cabinet could do.
How do the Liberals expect to get around this fact?
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Lots of liberals in the US favor lower taxes (than in Europe), less regulation (than in Europe) and longer work hours (than in Europe). You need to qualify what they believe in, not what they want less of.
Historically, the Liberal party started out as a classically liberal party, but it has been many decades since it has behafved even REMOTELY liberal.
The LPC does what is politically expedient, and has no principles AT ALL. Policy and philosophy are shaped solely by opinion polls and the direction of the leader of the day. It is for that reason that I don't hold much promise at all that switching parties would help further the cause of net neutrality. How trustworthy are the Liberals, and can you believe everything Ignatieff says? The track record (of the party OR the leader) is not promising. The past two Liberal PMs made countless pre-election promises only to do nothing, or the exact opposite, when in office. Cretien promised to get rid of the GST because it was a "stupid" regressive tax that was forced onto Canadians--and in his many years and terms in gov't left it intact. Today the Liberals hew and cry over employment insurance being inadequate and not accessible enough, when it was the Liberal party that instituted the very policies they complain about now (when "UI" became "EI" and changed were made to reduce costs when Cretien was PM and another former PM, Martin, was finance minister).
Policies also change with new leaders. Cretien was slightly "left-leaning" but would abandon his principles out of expediency (such as putting Martin in as long-term finance minister, making them one of the more fiscally conservative Liberal gov'ts). Martin shifted the Liberals as far right as the Harper Tory gov't is behaving today. Dion swung the party towards a socialist policy stance so close to that of the NDP the Liberals more than once formally approached the NDP about a coalition strategy--the result of which was electoral disaster (they got the second lowest percentage of seats and lowest popular vote in the party's history). Now Ignatieff is leader, and history shows that the Liberals policy is shaped by the leader. The problem is that Ignatieff has not clearly defined his stance yet so what he says about particular policies cannot be fully trusted.
Ignatieff was the child of aristocratic Russian diplomats, born in Canada but raised much of his life overseas. As a pre-teen he was sent to an Ontario boarding school, then attended Harvard in the US and spent over 20 years in the UK before moving to the US for over 5. As a student he volunteered in Trudeau's election campaign, and because of those distant ties was enticed back to Canada to enter politics by friends who thought he'd be an eventual Liberal leadership contender (in part because his ties with the party WERE NOT that strong and the hope was that voters would see him as a fresh start). Many make the argument that it is closed-minded to discount a candidate because they aren't "Canadian enough" (more "snobby" Canadians point to the US presidency requirements as how "backwards" such thinking is), but let's be reasonable--not only did this man who would lead Canada spend over half of his life in other countries--it was the LATTER HALF of that life that he spent away. I'd have no problem if a 60 year old from overseas that moved here 20 or 30 years ago wanted to be PM but Ignatieff lived not a single day in Canada from the 1970s until mere WEEKS before he ran for office! How can he profess to know what Canada of TODAY is about when all he knows first-hand is the Canada of the 1960s and 1970s? He has been off the political radar in this country for ages--what does he stand for? Nobody knows exactly, and more than any other party in Canada what the leader thinks matters most for the Liberals. A lot of what he has said in the past completely counters what the Liberals stood for in the recent past--he is strongly supportive of military action in Afghanistan and even Iraq. Though his motives might have differed from Bush, Ignatieff was a SUPPORTER of the GW Bush gov'ts "troop surge" for example, and there is speculation he would support military deployment of troops to Afghanistan indefinitely. He says little about what he beli
I'm still never voting Liberal. Never.
While in Opposition, the Liberal Party of Canada campaigned against:
- wage and price controls
- increased gas tax
- against the FTA (Free Trade Agreement)
- against the GST (Good and Services Tax)
Once elected the LPC did a 180% on each of those issues. The LPC has a history of saying what it thinks will get it elected and then doing whatever it wants to do (not that other parties are blameless on this). So I wouldn't put too much stock in this unless a senior member of the LPC said it was a matter of integrity and that he or she would resign if the party didn't follow through on its election promise - oh wait, we've been through that before. Seems "resign" doesn't quite mean what one would normally think it does.
If you think fighting private industry to get what you want is no fun, wait until you have to fight the government to get what you want. And if you
I don't really care for Michael Ignatief. He comes off looking a bit like a boob most of the time. But if the Liberals have some half-assed policies that don't suck (or at least don't suck as much os the conservatives), then next time, they get my vote. The bull-shit bill the conservatives have now (ISP's have to record everything that a person does on the net) is a massive massive invasion of privacy! Think of the children! Hackers could get into such a file system and violate childrens' rights of anonymity in criminal cases (young offenders names are never ever mentioned in the media). To ensure their protection, such a system must never be implemented! And if the fuck-wad conservatives try and push it through, they will LOSE THE NEXT ELECTION! They have been kow-towing to American right wing agendas for a long time. It must stop! If they think otherwise, they can voice their concerns from the desks of the opposition (where they will be).
To get net neutrality you need new regulations and more bureaucrats to enforce them and more bureaucrats to wipe the first gang's noses. What else would you expect from the Liberals?
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
If Canadians don't learn to vote strategically, he'll get in again and again.
I predict the Canadians won't vote strategically.
Let's first make sure I understand what you're saying. You're saying that the voters are split in three thirds, with two of them agreeing (to some extent, but much more than any other pair). You're saying the two semi-agreeing thirds should cooperate.
If the people belonging to the semi-agreeing thirds didn't have some disagreement, why aren't they one lump of size two thirds? If they do have such disagreement, aren't you asking one third of Canadian voters to give up on something they value? I'd think that third would say "why not the other third?".
The situation smells a lot like the ultimatum game: two players play; one player suggests a way to split a $100 bill, e.g. 60-40; the other play can either accept or reject; if he accepts, "the bank" pays them money according to the suggestion; if he rejects, no player gets anything.
In the real world, in some cultures (the economically and socially better off), you have to get damn close to 50-50 before players start accepting. Telling one third of voters to vote strategically (i.e. giving up something without the other third giving anything) sounds like it's too far from a 50-50 split to be feasible.
That's my take on it, fwiw...
Ignatieff thinks he's a strong leader and wants to be the strong leader of Canada. He's disqualified on that basis, no matter what he says about net neutrality, I'm still waiting for a politician to be clear that that the electorate is the leader and the government is the management that we, the leaders, have hired. Now Harper used to behave like that, but may have forgotten. Ignatieff is not an option.
Jedis are stupid. If they were so powerful, why couldn't they handle counseling for a kid who missed his mom?