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.'"

Comments

Now...

[whisper_jeff]

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....

Re:Now...

[Locklin]

If he gets a minority, the NDP also supports net neutrality.

http://www.ndp.ca/press/new-democrats-introduce-net-neutrality-bill

For anyone interested in Canadian net neutrality, http://neutrality.ca/ has regular updates.

Re:wow

[fyoder]

Canada just keeps getting more and more impressive. Again, ahead of the curve on social justice. They put the US to shame.

Not really. This is the opposition the article is about. And its not even a very good opposition. Harper, the PM, got passed minimum sentences for marijuana possession with the Liberals help. His mandate is to make Canada more like the US, and bit by bit perhaps he'll succeed. The left is split and he only needs about a third of the popular vote to form the gov't. If Canadians don't learn to vote strategically, he'll get in again and again.

Not necessarily what Canadians are hoping for.

[Jason Pollock]

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.

Re:Not necessarily what Canadians are hoping for.

[sedmonds]

The ISPs should have SLAs that document precisely how much bandwidth they are allowed to peak at.

They thought they did. They had contracted backhaul aggregation to their peering point at 151 Front St. One tariff covers the copper between end users and the CO, another tariff covers backhaul from COs to peering locations. The backhaul tariff resulted in Gig-E links from the Bell cloud. ISP looks at how much bandwidth they need, contract for that amount, plus error margin, plus expected growth. Peak requirement happens to occur during the hours Bell throttles. ISP is already tied into multi-year contracts for aggregated bandwidth that no longer matches their actual requirements.

The ideal world where third party providers can get customer concentrations high enough to create a business case for colocating DSLAMs and having their own backhaul or peering at each CO, or even at a meaningful number of COs, simply doesn't exist. Nevermind that many, many customers either cannot get dsl from a CO (only available through remotes, which Bell doesn't have to provide access to), or CO connections are available at embarassingly low sync rates.

Re:wow

[Concerned Onlooker]

Please. Once again, for all the creationists out there, evolution is not a religion. It is science. Science is based on observable phenomena. Religion is based on a feeling. And all this has absolutely nothing to do with homosexuality.