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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."
And of course the big ISPs get what they want, all they have to do is tell us first. How is this net neutrality?
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.
the CRTC really proved who has the pants in the family.
effectively, the ruling says "all we have to do (as ISP's; and let's not forget there are really only 3 flavours here) is provide notice that we are doing...everything we are already doing, and can now do it in a more legitimized way. thanks CRTC, the cheque is in the mail."
this really doesn't bode well for any new competition in any communications arena, including cell phone services, as the only players are the one's mentioned above.
for anyone mentioning that 'they own the pipes, let them do what they want". the canadian taxpayer subsidized the development of the networks involved, they were not privately funded. at the same time, money provided via a service charges on all bills was to go into a further system upgrade. the money seems to have never made it, and the companies continued to charge the fee and pocket the money the entire time AFTER the goverment had told them to stop it. it finally took a supreme court decision (yep, they fought it the entire way) to force them to spend the money on more than just fresh decorating the their offices.
So ISPs can't slow down time-sensitive traffic without prior approval by the CRTC, but there's no restrictions on slowing down other kinds of traffi, perhaps even to the point where the link is useless without being completely blocked? That's exactly the reason why I fear traffic shaping. Far too often it's used as a way to cripple people's connections rather than provide clients with true "quality of service".
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
How is warning given? One of my links at home is through shaw.ca, and the killer is that customer support can't email you at anything but a shaw.ca email address (I asked about an outage and was told an email was sent about the planned maintenance, I asked what address they had for me on file, they said none so I tried to give them kurt@seifried.org and they said sorry, we can't enter that into the system, it has to be a shaw.ca address). I suspect warning will consist of a printed notice being placed in a filing cabinet with a sign saying "beware the leopard" on the front of it. The reality is that most large ISP's in North America are going to screw customers as much as possible and reduce infrastructure development due to short sighted accounting practices (rather than take a long term approach that would benefit customers and their bottom line ultimately). Case in point: my shaw cablemodem service is only twice as fast when I first signed up about 10 years ago, and that's with bandwidth caps in place.
Well it's a little more than just a 30/60 day notification. They have to demonstrate to the CRTC that they have tried everything and still had to resort to traffic shaping in order to maintain quality of service.
One of the simple recommendations was to charge higher rates for high bandwith consumption. This isn't a blow for Net Neutrality but at the same time, they're not allowed to throttle for the next 30/60 days. Smaller ISPs will have to find other ways of competing other than offering unlimited bandwith for peanuts. It sucks but at least they have some avenues to pursue.
The US and Canada are so far behind in internet infrastructure it's pathetic. I forget the report I read recently but it said somthing like it would take 10 years or more for us to upgrade our infrastructure to even come close to Malaysia, South Korea, and Japan.
Many of these ISP's were subsidized by the government (at least in the USA) in agreement that they would upgrade their infrastructure so we could be on par with the rest of the world technologically. Many of our tax dollars paid for this 'upgrade' but in the end we got nothing. It is one of the biggest overlooked schemes ever.
The idea that traffic shaping should even be considered is total crap. North America should already have the infrastructure to handle the traffic at speeds far beyond what we're used to. I smell another 20 years of slow very incrimental speed increases all while we are sucked dry $49.00 a month for "High speed internet!! 50 times faster than dialup!!!!! Can't you believe that?? 50 times faster than DIALUP!"
Really? I sometimes consult with a small ISP and their pipes are their pipes. Their transit is a fiber connection put in by a large ISP.
Everything is just fine most of the time. The condo's are fed with large pipes. Some of the condo's that this ISP services have pure Ethernet switches with no rate limiting per port. It only takes one person will fire up their P2P program and suck up all the bandwidth to the building. No biggie I say. I don't really care until latency states taking a hit. The ISP doesn't care until they get a letter from one of the movie studios. It would be nice to de-prioritize P2P traffic so the people that just simply want to use their VoIP phone or browse the web don't have issues with high latency. Now the government has to get in the middle of this because the ISP has a couple of people that like to run their P2P programs during high traffic hours? Screw that!
"world wide web" isn't synonymous with "internet"
my internet is netscape where do i get world wide web
how do i shot web?
The sad thing is, the last person I know who said something like that said it literal years ago. These days it's all "my internet is the blue e where do i get world wide web" or worse, "my facebook is the blue e where do i get internet"
But ISPs should be required to validate the shaping. ISPs should be required to provide a web interface to allow users to see if shaping took place. The amount of shaping, what traffic was shaped, and why it was required should also be provided upon request. And overall statistics should be posted to ensure that the ISPs do not rely on shaping as a replacement for infrastructure investment (typically funded by the government).
Without this information there is no way to keep the ISPs honest. So require that is is available. And the legal right for an ISP to shape traffic should be preserved just in case it is occasionally required.
As is stands, this is not required. Net neutrality just died in Canada.
From Telecom Regulatory Policy CRTC 2009-657: (emphasis mine)
I'm sorry, but I don't grok how a router can tell an IP packet has an illicit payload. Now wouldn't that be just what the ISP need to throttle any P2P protocol, in fact making all this “warn before you harm” policy moot?
Slashdotters see a "Net Neutrality" debate, which is a borrowed phrase that encompasses a lot more than "can an ISP use packet analysis to throttle BitTorrent", which is what Bell, Rogers, etc, customers see this as.
What this ruling is about, however, goes back to how smaller ISPs were created in the first place in Canada. Basically, the CRTC said, about 20 years ago, something that might be summed up as:
Because you (the Telecos) enjoy a Utility status you have to, at the same price it costs you to transmit data across your lines, sell connectivity to smaller ISPs across those same lines, and do so in a manner that doesn't discriminate against them to your competitive advantage.
You can't offer your own customers access to a pipe that you don't also offer these independents.
You cannot say no to an ISP who wants to set up shop and needs what is on your poles and cables.
We are making you do this because we made it easy for you to build those poles across public and private land a long time ago, so there is a public interest in that infrastructure.
We do this because we think competition amongst a large number of providers is better than handing you the whole shebang to screw with like you did the phone system for about a hundred years.
Come around 2007 or so, and these independent ISPs complain that the telecos are throttling the lines they sell to these independent ISPs by the use of packet sniffing technology hunting for P2P data, and they go to the CRTC, who sets these rules, and complain that the telecos are not living up to the bargain outlined above. What they wanted was for the CRTC to say the teleco can do whatever it wants to their own customers, but the pipe to the indy ISPs must be as fat and unencumbered as ever.
The telecos respond saying "we have to, or our network will be overwhelmed".
The indy ISPs did not get what they wanted ... a ban on traffic shaping of any kind.
They did, however get what they were promised a few decades ago (see above). A lot of the noise over this last ruling comes from people who have accounts with ISPs and wanted a ruling saying "you can't throttle my BitTorrent traffic".
The fundamental issue, however, was addressed: This ruling says telecos cannot throttle anything they sell to these indy ISPs that they don't throttle to their own customers. They leave it up to the telecos to manage their network, but let it be known they won't tolerate the telecos doing something to the indy ISPs unless they also do it to themselves in exactly the same way and under exactly the same circumstances.
You bitch, but its better than what you have now. Right now they don't have to even tell you.
Frankly, I must say I don't quite understand what happened in the network neutrality debate. IIRC, it began several years ago when some US ISP's wanted to blackmail content providers or just companies that could afford to be blackmailed by threatening to throttle their own customers access to specific sites (like Google) unless they paid.
That should have resulted in a quick and simple 'no-no' against discriminating against certain sites or not in exchange for blackmail money.
But somehow, through what seems to be misunderstandings and/or pure misinformation, it got expanded to include everything up to even normal (and often reasonable) traffic management practices that have basically always been around (they can, of course, can be discriminatory and completely unreasonable as well (like throttling without congestion reasons, throttling protocols that compete with your own services, etc), but tends to be far from as asinine as site discrimination as they're generally easier to bypass and make pointless if they becomes really intrusive).
I think the whole debate could do with a complete reset and a clean restatement of what the discussion is about. Or split into several discussions.
Oh, well. At least the blackmail plans seem to have been shelved for the moment.