CRTC Issues Net Neutrality Rules

An anonymous reader writes "The CRTC today introduced a new framework to guide Internet service providers in their use of Internet traffic management practices. ISPs will be required to inform retail customers at least 30 days, and wholesale customers at least 60 days, before an Internet traffic management practice takes effect. At that time, ISPs will need to describe how the practice will affect their customers' service. The Commission encourages ISPs to make investments to increase network capacity as much as possible. However, the Commission realizes that ISPs may need other measures to manage the traffic on their networks at certain times. Technical means to manage traffic, such as traffic shaping, should only be employed as a last resort."

Comments

As someone living in Canada..

[Anrego]

.. and I know this will get -1 troll.. but I have to say it...

fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck..

and of course.. FUCK!!

Re:As someone living in Canada..

[BitZtream]

You bitch, but its better than what you have now. Right now they don't have to even tell you.

This doesn't seem to preclude having a different law requiring it to be fair. This is just to make sure it is disclosed to you.

Re:As someone living in Canada..

[cjfs]

I trust you already contacted the CRTC and representatives in your area? Maybe made donations or volunteered for parties that oppose this? Perhaps started creating ways to convince the general population this is a bad idea?

Or did you just post 37 expletives and forget about it?

Re:As someone living in Canada..

[lamapper]

the Canadian taxpayer subsidized the development of the networks involved, they were not privately funded

Same here in the USA. Since the 1990s, it has been estimated that the Telcos (& Cable Companies) have received in excess of $200 Billion dollars, specifically for laying Fiber to yours and my home. None of which was done. The telcos made promises, in order to receive money + additional taxes on bills + additional fees on bills (many of which, if not all fees & taxes are still being collected) that they would put fiber to our homes.

Worth repeating, The telcos received American tax revenue to put fiber to our homes and apartments. They have been receiving this money since the 1990s. They still receive money today.

Where's the Fiber? (Think 80s Wendy's commercial, Where's the Beef? and you have the right idea)

In addition, they spend in excess of $1.8 million per week to lobby our elected officials against net neutrality, to prevent being forced to run fiber to our homes, to prevent losing their monopoly/oligopoly tiered pricing system, to prevent being forced to provide enough upstream bandwidth so that Americans can watch IP TV, Videos and "rich" content via the Internet. All because they want to force to you pay for content via their Cable system ONLY.

This has been going on for over 20+ years.

The telcos were asked to provide fiber to homes in Wilson N.C., but refused. Based on their refusal the local politicians decided to get fiber for their community and invited Greenlight into the community. Greenlight put fiber to people's homes and charged $100 per month for 100Mbps / 100Mbps (synchronous, not throttled) service to their customers.

The Cable Company / telco response was to lobby the state legislature in North Carolina in order to prevent Greenlight from doing business and to prevent other communities from providing decent fiber service to themselves. The public record is there for all to see. It started last session and will continue next session. Citizens of North Carolina, do something before its too late, let your politicians know that they need to force open the market and invite businesses in to put fiber all the way to people's homes. Nothing less is acceptable.

It's been 20+ years if American providers wanted you to have fiber you would have had it by now. Stop defending the FUD and them. They do not deserve anything but your contempt.

FIOS charges $119 for 50MB/5MB. At least its Fiber.

In Japan, they have had 100Mbps/100Mbps for less than $55 per month as of 2000, thanks to government deregulation of NTT and fiber to homes. (Americans would have had this had the telcos been prevented from watering down and making un enforceable, The "Telecommunications Act of 1996". The telcos lobbyists were very effective. One can only imagine the parties held at Cable Company / Telco boardrooms all across the country at putting one over on American citizens.)

In Japan, by 2006, those same consumers were getting 1 Gbps / 1 Gbps (again synchronous service, not throttled or shaped) for less than $52 per month. Unlike in America where politicians (primarily Republicans) keep touting Market competition, it actually exists in Japan, not here in America. In America corporate monopolies and oligopolies prevent competition.

If the market would or could work, it would have. Face facts Americans, the market is NOT working. We have a 20 year proof and history. Other markets that are not working are obvious as well...wake up Americans, its already too late!

One might ask how the Japanese could give more bandwidth to consumers while lowering prices at the same time.

Very good question as here in America, the telcos/cable companies try to lie and tell Americans that bandwidth is scarce. It is not. This is a lie, it is FUD. Just look at the conversations they have with investors to get the truth of the

Re:As someone living in Canada..

[gordguide]

What does forming a company and selling it to private investors who, unless they are idiots, value it for what it is, have to do with subsidies?

Subsidies are collected from the public and paid to the private. If you are a Crown, you are not a private company, anymore than NASA is a private company.

But, if after a firm becomes privately owned, whether closely held or trading on a public stock market, you then give it cash collected from the taxpayer, that's a subsidy.

All of your examples, by the way, were private firms long before there was an internet.

Re:As someone living in Canada..

[TheRaven64]

The confusion happened because it was in the best interests of the ISPs. They initially proposed filtering based on off-network endpoints. This was widely disliked, and the term 'neutral network' was adopted to describe a network that didn't do that. Rather than address the real issues, the ISPs then took this term and created a straw man of a network that didn't do any traffic shaping at all, then attacked this. As a result, the term 'network neutrality' is now quite misleading. I think most of us would agree that these things are not acceptable:

• Blocking trafic based on the protocol.
• Delaying traffic based on the remote address.
• Breaking well-defined Internet protocols such as DNS.
• Using their network in an anticompetitive manner, for example prioritising VoIP packets using their service over VoIP packets using someone else's.

While the following are acceptable:

• Respecting QoS flags so that services like VoIP that use low bandwidth but require low latency get prioritised, while packets that are not latency sensitive get more bandwidth but in a lower priority channel.
• Notifying users that are sending out virus traffic.
• Charging heavy network users more.

Unfortunately, depending on whom you ask, some or all of these come under the 'network neutrality' umbrella.

Re:Ownership

[Anrego]

"Their pipes" were built with government money.

As someone who pays taxes.. I expect the people who run the network I paid for to do so in a way that best serves me..

Useless

[foo fighter]

ISPs will be required to inform retail customers at least 30 days, and wholesale customers at least 60 days, before an Internet traffic management practice takes effect.

Most locales have de facto ISP monopolies. This ruling will just give customers 30 days warning of a rape, with no practical way to avoid it. Arguably better in theory, but no different in practice.

Re:Useless

[JoshuaZ]

Yes, and what fraction of customers are going to have a detailed understanding of what the letter means. They can barely understand that "world wide web" isn't synonymous with "internet" let alone understand what traffic shaping means. Indeed, many people might notice problems when they try to do things and not even realize why. This is the real danger of non-neutrality: websites and dowloads taking time and people not even understanding why. The end result: They won't go to those websites. They'll assume something is wrong with the website not something wrong with their ISP.

Re:Useless

[Korbeau]

At least it opens a debate.

A few months ago it was really unclear that the CRTC would ever lean ever so slightly in the direction of the consumer, all indicated the contrary. A previous preliminary ruling for Bell traffic shaping of its wholesalers gave almost all authority in the hands of Bell. I'm amongst what is I'm sure a lot of fellow Canadian slashdotters that petitioned against it.

Also remember that the CRTC is an old organization that is not very adapted nor flexible enough to take a real stand in modern communication issues. I find it better that they keep a cautious neutral stand in slight favor of openess, net-neutrality and of consumers rights than simply closing their eyes like they used to do in the past years.

At least from now on we won't discover shaping practices by pure random amateur discovery but we will be notified and will be able to fully protest. It also opens the debate in a language the media will be able to understand.

A good thing overall IMO - but we'll have to wait and see.

Last resort

[darthwader]

We tried positive visualization, prayer beads, and yelling really loud at the routers. Nothing worked. I guess we'll have to implement traffic shaping now.

Thank you, CRTC

[yamfry]

We appreciate that you are encouraging the incumbent oligopolists to "make investments to increase network capacity as much as possible" by providing them with an incentive to do the exact opposite. I guess that's what happens when friends regulate friends.

Re:Ownership

[causality]

Yes, just like the railroads in the 19th century that were paid for by the government. There's a reason we called the people who then refused to give any money back to the government or listen to government legislation about the railroads "robber barons." Fun fact: When this was going on, one of the strongest opponents of the robber barons was Ambrose Bierce whom you may know as the writer of an "An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge" and "The Devil's Dictionary." If he were alive today he would likely be railing against this sort of poor treatment of net neutrality.

I am not fond of putting it this way, but it happens to be the truth. The robber-barons were successful for one reason and one reason alone: the government and the citizens didn't have the balls to do whatever it took to hold them accountable. They caved and they kow-towed. So the robber-barons were enriched, no one liked it, and no one did a damned thing about it.

Had the government instead revoked their corporate charters and sold all their assets at public auction for failure to comply with the legislation, we would all be telling a very different story. Even more so, if this had been accompanied by a widespread boycott of all rail services, with the intention not of reforming them, but of driving them into bankruptcy. I am not fond of it and I don't like it, but every now and then a message along the lines of "don't fuck with us" needs to be delivered. This seems perfectly acceptable when corporations take minors to court over copyright. I see no reason why the citizens should hold back and refuse to take every lawful action available to them to keep the corporations in check.

Re:Ownership -- not always

[Reapman]

Your argument might carry weight if you weren't AC and provided more then generic terms. For all I know your talking about your condo in Italy or Brazil.

Considering your talking about a small ISP that owns their own pipe's I'd wager your very much NOT in Canada.

Why does the army care?

[Anonymous Freak]

Really, why would the U.S. Army's Cold Regions Test Center give a rat's ass about net neutrality?

 

 

 

(aka: Watch when you use acronyms. U.S.-centric acronyms are one thing, /. readers are used to it, but non-U.S. acronyms will be completely mis-construed by a vast majority of /.ers.)

Re:Why does the army care?

[agnosticnixie]

You're the first to do it, and bringing up an obscure sub department of Army R&D is very very stretching it.

Re:Subsidies for ip networks in Canada

[Anonymous Coward]

"the canadian taxpayer subsidized the development of the networks"

OK... I see this statement now and then but never with any support. Does anyone have a specific reference for direct subsidies to BELL, Shaw, Rogers, TELUS, etc from govts to build their IP networks?

The POTS/TDM side was rooted in the natural monopoly system which saw large revenues from long distance get fed back into building of infrastructure. We also, at one time, had government ownership in the public communications arena but that is long gone. I can't find a good reference to a similar situation with IP networks.

So forgive me if I am not using the correct search terms. Can anyone provide enlightenment?

Also, its Policy and NOT Legislation

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing in this policy limits network providers from managing their networks in any manner they deem fit. If anything, it could work to prevent complaints. The complaint against Bell about P2P traffic management in a wholesale service fell through when it was determined that Bell had taken appropriate action and had not violated any rules. If Bell had published the ITMP, the complaint would likely have been killed sooner with less publicity.

Also, this is policy and not legislation. In Canada, government departments like to issue policies and then act as if it has force of law. A policy can be challenged in court more easily than legislation and can often be ignored if there is no legislative weight behind it. This policy seems to be full of ambiguity (eg: what exactly qualifies as an ITMP? does suppression of DoS traffic? How about filtering of individuals for EULA violations? What about contract services where the provider specifically says they will use ITMPS? umm... or law enforcement requests?).

All the policy really does is:

* point at section 27.2 of the 1993 Telecommunications act. er... the "fairness" section
* ask network providers to publish ITMPs in advance (there is no penalty for not doing so, and no legislation to back this up).
* vaguely outlines the evaluation process the CRTC will go through to determine if the ITMP is fair, if the CRTC receives a complaint. Lots of weasel words and motherhood statements. Not a lot of meat.

I don't believe this policy changes anything; it does provide the appearance of doing something.

Now, now: play nicely everyone and don't bother the CRTC.

Thanks for nothing CRTC...

[Interoperable]

The ruling is a big fat nothing. No seriously CRTC, could you have made any ruling that said less than this one? "Do what you want, but we reserve the right to not like it. Just give your customers warning so that they can also not like it and not do anything about it."

At least they could have said, "we don't give a flying fuck about net neutrality one way or the other so we're not going to regulate," but they didn't. They simply tried to come as close as possible to not actually making a decision. Even if you choose wrong at least have the balls to decide something.

Re:Uhm, no

[Nabeel_co]

...Will the customer whose PC got infected and got shutdown or rate-limited be able to take the matter to the CRTC and recieve renumeration, while fining the ISP for protecting the quality of service for their other subscribers?

It shouldn't up to the ISPs to decide what is and/or to take care of DDoS attacks or spam bots.

When I was on Rogers, my server would send me email updates quite frequently, and suddenly it stopped working, because Rogers assumed my server and any other residential computer that was sending out emails was sending spam.

In fact, sendmail doesn't work at all if you are on a Rogers residential network, and that's just wrong. I should be able to send email from my machine without using someone else's SMTP server.

Basicly what you just said it's ok for Rogers, Bell, Telus, etc. to be judge, jury, and executioner.

That's the CRTCs job, a job that they don't seem to want to do, because, hell, they have no problem with Rogers, Bell and the others being in control, raking the citizens of Canada over the coals, while making heaps of money.

Rogers, Bell and the rest, should simply provide a connection to the internet. No more, no less. Any filtering, blocking, or traffic shaping should be done by the government. (Which we, in theory, have control of)

On another somewhat related topic:
Here's a good idea:
ISPs should either drop bandwidth caps completely, or drop tiered connection speeds.
I think the best solution for bandwidth usage is to give the customer the fastest connection their hardware will support at no extra cost, and just charge them per GB for every GB.

eg. I go with Rogers, and get a basic connection for $5 a month, the speed is the fastest that the network and my modem will allow regardless of how much a pay a month (lets say 30Mbps). If at the end of the month I end up using 30GB I will get charged at the rate of $1 per GB, If I end up using 60, I'll get charged $0.75 per GB, if I use 150 GB I end up paying $0.50 per GB

Why you ask? Well, there is no real point is limiting people's connection speed. It's the same technology, and same connection, your link speed is just an arbitrary cap in software (as far as residential internet is concerned anyway). Giving me a faster connection doesn't cost Rogers anything extra, all it does is insure that I am using the networks resources for a longer period of time then is necessary. What does cost money is the throughput. If I have a 5Mbps connection and am transferring 200 GB per month, I'm costing Rogers more than someone who has an 18Mbps connection and only transfers 20GB per month. Since their costs come from the throughput, why don't they just charge for that, and drop all this speed cap crap? It would be much more profitable in the long run.

Re:Ownership

[Anonymous Coward]

it's 'this attitude' that keeps us from being bent over a table and fiscally raped by the telcos, and attitudes like yours - the turning of a blind eye towards what is the start of a very slippery slope - that allows abuses to happen that will eventually escalate.

This really is a simple problem with a simple solution.

ISP's oversubscribe, take all the money for the subscriptions, then blame the users when their business practices bite them in the arse as users attempt to use what they've paid for.

The simple solution is DON'T OVERSUBSCRIBE.

It will definitely bite into the profit margin of an ISP - but when this profit is based on essentially defrauding customers I don't think it is asking too much for them to roll it into providing the service they agreed to provide in the first place.

.