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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 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!!
And of course the big ISPs get what they want, all they have to do is tell us first. How is this net neutrality?
The same way the Sedition Act wasn't supporting sedition;(
And innovation takes another giant leap backwards.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
"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..
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.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
And the Internet Town Hall Meeting in Halifax NS October 26th apparently can't get any mainstream press interest. Gee, guess there's nothing to see here, move along citizen, etc. Net Neutrality is getting covered there.
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.
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.
I hate it when I make a joke and I get modded "+5 insightful". Mod the stupid comments "funny", not "insightful", pleas
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.
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.
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!"
They can, if they don't want the benefits associated with being a carrier, and they'll have to make it clear they aren't an 'ISP' or something like that so people are not confused by it.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
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!
I've been following this and there's really no difference to what telco/cablecos are doing right now. It's all spin factor you see:
"We're adding* protective measures* to ensure your regular* internet use* remains at high level of quality you've come to expect from Bellusawtron."
* at at additional $1.99/mo to your bill
* that prevent legitimate technology use that might be used for criminal/copyright infringrment purposes... like your computer
* Checking your @Bellusawtron.com email and browsing the telco/cableco news potal
* Which is 3-4 times per week for less than 30 minutes per session
Simply put, nothing's changed. Companies are now required to provide the spin letters they've been doing for years. Service is being fundamentally limited, but in a way that a majority of users won't understand relates to the message sent.
The funny/sad part is the fiber market has both improved and dropped in price tremendously with competition where I'm from, but just you try getting above a 1mbit connection to your home, or even a 1mbit who's QoS doesn't go to crap when you hit 60% usage.
-Matt
--- Need web hosting?
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.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Hypothetical scenario: an ISP is under DDoS attack originating from some fixed foreign IP. Since it becomes impossible to "block access" without CRTC approval, does that mean the ISP has to take it like a bitch while waiting from the OK to have it blackholed? What about any other kinds of attacks? What about Spam filtering?
I really don't think the CRTC really understands the issue. I should know, I listened to some of the public hearings a few months back.
Disclaimer: I work for an affected ISP.
They're already traffic shaping, this just gives them an official OK..
Business as usual folks, nothing to see here.
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.
MTS is not bad, but you have to live in Manitoba. We live in a small town about 30km from Winnipeg and we get 8/1 DSL. In the city it's a bit better upload, but it sure beats dial-up or satellite, because there's really nothing else out here (aside from a couple fixed wireless providers). Luckily they don't seem to give a shit what you download or how much. This month I've burned through 56gb downloading about 30-40 torrents. They seem to be acting like a "dumb pipe" which is great for me. No caps, no throttling that I've noticed. Unlike Shaw (their only direct competitor), they don't seem to cap or throttle.
However, MTS does have a telephone line monopoly in Manitoba. Not long ago it was a Crown Corporation, but it was privatized in 1996 I think. They could be jerks if they wanted to I guess, but I suspect a good chunk of their customers might jump ship to Shaw for phone, internet and TV. Shaw is too much of a competitor in every area except cellular for them to really start floundering around and doing stupid shit.
Also, as far as I know, MTS doesn't allow anyone else to offer DSL (à la local loop unbundling) so there is no Teksavvy & co. here just yet, but I suspect that may happen at some point.
Can't reach _any_ Michael Geist sites (from either my cable and DSL conns). Coincidence? I think not!!!
Just once.
And if the ISPs bitch too much, saying it's no longer profitable, then have the gov appropriate the "infrastructure upgrades" we paid for, and lease their use. Send 'em a bill for upgrade cash that wasn't spent on the network.
Sent from my PDP-11
You voted Conservative? Yes, it's your fault my Internet sucks, jerk.
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.
sounds cool. I'm in Tronno...
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
...we're always fucked up every orifice we've got, so there's no surprise here.
Did you read the ruling?
ISPs don't get to throttle at a whim. They can throttle, but if they do, they have to demonstrate to the CRTC that the throttling is as narrow as possible to solve the problem and, importantly, economic measures like tiers, or building capacity would not solve the problem. They're also not allowed to throttle any protocol so hard as to effectively block it, or throttle things like VOIP without advanced, explicit permission for the CRTC.
That's a big improvement over the status quo at the moment, which has allowed the ISPs to throttle for years with no oversight for any reason they felt like.
"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..
I hate that sense of entitlement attitude. Me me me and fuck everyone else.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
Did this happen because I voted Conservative? Or, put another way, would this have happened if the Liberals were in power?
The liberals stated their support of net neutrality earlier in the year.
Me and everyone who's _not_ the telecommunication industry
I'm not in telecommunications, and I don't share your attitude thank you very much.
Its a competition, not a government entity. The CRTC ruling doesn't change anything except make public the rules. If it's public, people will choose the supplier with more favourable rules, so eventually the free market will change things.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
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.)
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
I could not agree more.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Videotron?
Okay, I'm kidding. I keep hearing about a nice local ISP in Toronto, forgot their name. I know Montreal and Southern Quebec has CoopTel which isn't too predatory.
"Primary ISPs generally submitted that for this reason, ITMPs designed to address congestion that are applied to their retail
services must also be applied to wholesale services provided to secondary ISPs."
Why could they not move to protect the ISP's who buy pipe space, best effort or dedicated bandwidth.
So the Canadian gov can protect real bandwidth to paying customers ie other smaller regional or national ISP's.
What a smaller regional ISP does with a pipe is of no real interest to a telco, the pipe is in place and if the ISP packs it, up and down , they paid for it.
What the national networks do to their locked in consumers on their own networks is fine print.
But to get a free pass to shape ISP's pipes must have taken some 'gifts'.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
"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?
I suppose it's especially important that they reveal to customers they participate in the traffic management practice called "Spam and virus Filtering" or "Bulk Mail filtering", including references to such things as spam folders, deletion/quarantine, etc, etc.
Otherwise, I see spammers going straight to the CRTC and raising complaints against ISPs for blocking or degrading their network performance (ability to deliver spam e-mail to their customers).
A similar issue exists for other types of internet abusers (that the ISP may blackhole or block access from to customers, for whatever reason)
Rulings in favor of Net Neutrality don't just benefit content providers that customers want access to/from.
The bad guys (even the ones offering spam, malware, viruses, adware, scams, etc) are content providers also
Teksavvy is the name.
AFAIK their DSL traffic is routed over Bell's infrastructure...just like virtually all third-party providers.
And an article link posted (from the National Post?) a few months ago on here mentioned it was the liberals who actually put it on the table in the first place, while they were in power.
In general:
It takes more than one party to enable this nonsense. Last year after Geist brought this to our attention, there were a lot of knee-jerk reactions of "evil Conservatives". Get real and use your brain, people. This is not a single party issue. So many people were waving around their single-coloured flags (red or blue) so hard they forgot to actually deal with the freaking issue.
Furthermore, anyone desperate to get back into power can promise anything they like (like reducing GST... which didn't happen until only a couple years ago...). This is the case for ANY party.
The reason I am in sciences instead of politics is because I never had any interest in playing the same childish junior high verbal games over and over again... or at least, not having it take up the majority of my day. I couldn't abide being that useless. On the other hand, if you like the science of bullshit, get into politics.
both parties are garbage. You have to take the garbage out now and then or it really starts to stink. The liberals got too smelly.
It shouldn't matter what party is in power when the CRTC makes decisions? I suppose the CBC should also be neutral instead of having a liberal slant as well.
I haven't read the ruling but it sounds like it is all you can expect. Some traffic *is* more important than other traffic and some people pay a premium for faster/lower latency connections.
At least the telcos aren't allowed to deliberately slow down VOIP
Bah, at least Videotron has fast Internet. They're just as big crooks as Bell and Rogers, but they give faster net. It's better than nothing?
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.
*shrugs* I'd wish it was, they're basically in the media monopolists' camp.
Ah, I just posted exactly this question so my other post is redundant. Mod up the parent of this one and let us know if anyone has a source.
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
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.
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
Excuse my ignorance, I don't live in the USA so I'm not involved (yet), but doesn't the underlying problem stem from the fact that US ISPs aren't allowed to bill subscribers per megabyte of bandwidth consumed? If subscribers paid for the bandwidth that they actually use, plus a fixed connection fee, the whole net neutrality debate might become totally irrelevant. Users who want to download gigabytes per day would no longer be a problem, they would be an opportunity. What's wrong with the old-fashioned idea of paying for what you use, rather than getting your neighbour to pay for it? Or is it more complicated than that?
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.
"Their pipes" were built with government money.
Bullcrap. What government money? Bell, Shaw, Rogers, TELUS [the largest Canadian providers] are private companies and their networks have been built with shareholder dollars. Are you a shareholder? Then you have shareholder rights.
The only money you've paid for these guys is via your monthly bill, and that is not a subsidy.
Hey... that doesn't mean we shouldn't criticize them.
http://www.teksavvy.com/
You're welcome. Unfortunately... a crtc decision will soon doom these companies. Go here to complain: http://www.consumersforinternetcompetition.com/
Cripes... somebody posts a claim that appeals to the majority (even though it is patently false ie: taxpayer funded networks) and gets modded 5 for insightful.
Anyone who rightfully calls shenanigans and asks for support for the claim gets tagged as a troll or flamebait. Just mod me -1 by default.
And why sidetrack the discussion just because someone commenting is AC? You can see from AC's words that he/she is likely Canadian.
Anyways, I'm with AC on this. I really don't want the CRTC getting complicating things when there already is sufficient legislation to deal with the issues. (1993 Telecommunications Act)
Boycott is a bit more difficult in this situation. I'm with teksavvy which is completely pro netneutrality and very open, has high caps and no traffic shaping. No desire to hurt them at all.... Unfortunately since Bell owns the lines they have to pay bell for access. As well I don't know how reasonable it is to give up the internet completely in Canada ... we don't have some shining alternative except for resellers.
Though that might not mean much it is certainly better than nothing. I believe obama has stated support for net neutrality as well.... but it hasn't so cleanly happened.
In return for the privileges that corporations receive (and for the inherent power they gain over individuals), some price has to be paid. Regulating commerce is exactly one of the things we the people (in an enlightened liberal state) specifically empower government to do.
This would hold even if the pipes were not subsidized with public money.
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
Man, it's much more than that, most of the people who are in the CRTC used to actually work for those companies.
Rogers, especially, has been advertising how you can download an HD movie in 2.3 seconds on their max best super ultra service. But they don't tell you that it's only if you do it from an authorized partner while using their DNS hijacking. Fuck them, it's my bandwidth, let me do it how I want. Now they have to tell us.
While it's not endgame, it's at least a step in the right direction.
Keep on knockin'
https://robbiecrash.me
We already have a mechanism for that.
It's called RFC 795.
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc795
Their pipes, at least the expensive last-mile ones, generally run over (or, rather, under) ground that is owned by the people and controlled by the government on their behalf, for example streets. They were permitted to lay these pipes to provide certain services because the government, on behalf of the people, felt that it was advantageous for them to do so. They are allowed to exist as a corporation which exists because the government, acting on behalf of the people, awarded them a corporate charter, which exists for the sole reason that it was decided that their existence would benefit society.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Traffic management is necessary because bandwidth is less than infinite. Extreme consumers will impair service to others if there is no mechanism to prevent this. My company recently implemented bandwidth guarantees for VOIP traffic on the fiber between our buildings because file transfers were causing drop outs on phone calls. In other words our routers throttle file transfers to provide decent QOS for voice. I like the CRTC's approach because it provides transparency of ISPs QOS policies and creates an environment for competitive incentive to avoid abusive restrictions, with some fallback for adult supervision.
I'm a moderately heavy bittorent (Vuze) user. My ISP is Rogers Cable, whose internet service is available in a number of speeds/caps/pricing from $25 to $150 per month. Rogers has been reasonably open about its traffic management practices and is on record as throttling bittorrent on the upstream (from the house) because this is a scarce resource. Problems for me - nil; obscure torrents with few peers/seeds run slowly, popular torrents download like sh** through a goose; surfing and Skype work smoothly even in peak periods. I left Bell Sympatico when my experience was the opposite.
Yes, just to get from the customer to their own connexions to the internet. And real tech support staffed with knowledgeable an helpful people that do care.
During that era, the government officials who might have put a stop to the railroad robber barons all had several thousand reasons (mostly with Benjamin Franklin on the front) for not doing so. Where do you think the term "railroading" in reference to legislation came from?
It wasn't even subtle: it was along the lines of railroad executives coming into Washington with suitcases of cash and each congresscritter stopping by and leaving with filled pockets.
I am officially gone from
I may need it for the speed
While a nice idea, in practice this can't work. Mass boycott of the ISPs would cripple many businesses, and produce alot of whiny Facebook addicts.
For that matter, we are all so numb to the realities of the world around us that it is next to impossible to organize any sort of mass rebellion to fix this type of thing. People want to go back to their Facebook and WOW and forget the ever present BOHICA.
Telus in British Columbia was "BC Tel". I may be wrong, but I believe that in both BC and Alberta (western-most and adjascent province) they were at least one time partly public entities.
This article mentions Telus as having been provincially owned in Alberta:
http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/index.cfm?PgNm=TCE&Params=M1ARTM0011790
This article mentions "BC Tel" as having been a public utility:
http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/BRITISH-COLUMBIA-TELEPHONE-COMPANY-Company-History.html
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.
.
I see a lot of people saying that this law is useless. On its own, with the market for service as limited as it is in many places, maybe that's so.
On the other hand, do you really want to start living with government-mandated network management policies? Do you think they'll get it right? Do you think political influences won't lead to regulations that require network management policies to suppress, say, p2p traffic?
Perhaps you wonder what's wrong with a law that says "all traffic must be treated as equal"? Apart from the fact that this is bad network management policy, what's wrong is it will never happen.
Why do I say it's bad policy? Well, spam is traffic. Botnet c&c is traffic.
Pretend we can write regulations that require all "legitimate" traffic to be treated as equal (and somehow define 'legitimate' in an appropraite way -- again, do you think p2p won't be slighted?)... now you're saying the only service that can be legally sold is flat bandwidth? If I want to offer a service that reserves some of your bandwidth for VoIP or streaming media, I can't? If I come up with some innovative new service that requires special network QoS treatment, it can never be marketed?
Ok, so maybe we say that you can offer traffic shaping, but you have to offer a flat bandwidth option as well. I'm not sure this is technically feasible, and I have my doubts about letting regulators make that call, but we're getting close to the solutions I think are reasonable.
The key element is the involvement of consumer choice. Consumer choice requires (1) that there be options, and (2) that the consumer be informed enough to choose among those options. This law helps with the second point, so I'm not so sure it's useless... but it does leave the first point unaddressed.
In general, consumer choice does not require that any particular option you may want be available. If there is true competition, then any option that "everybody wants" is going to be offered by someone. Regulating an industry to ensure true competition isn't easy, though.
If you don't have true competition, what can you do? Well, requiring everyone to offer a particular option amongst their offerings is one possibility. It can get tricky. ("Sure, we have a flat, unshaped 1Mbps option.") I dislike the idea that to sell one thing I'd be required to also sell something else, as this could destroy legitimate niche business models.
Setting up a government-run option to compete with the private providers is another idea; the US is debating this approach to healthcare. It's tricky to ensure the government provides just the right offering. Ideally you want it to be good enough that it keeps the other guy honest, but not so good that people flock to it unless the other guy becomes dishonest. It drags the government into lines of business many of us don't think they should be in. It is subject to politics. (Again, what happens when the government says "no p2p on our network"?) And in the case of ISP service, you have to decide if you trust the government to handle all of your traffic; will they respect your privacy?
Overall, any solution that doesn't involve true competition is going to be a compromise, and true competition is going to be hard to get. So, pick your poison and start pushing for whichever solution seems practical and acceptable to you.
But if you really look at it, any good solution is going to include keeping consumers more informed; so instead of wallowing in negativity about how this law doesn't solve the entire problem, you should consider it a positive first step and start doing something useful toward the next step.
Cogeco doesn't throttle, or block, anything. They do have bandwidth caps, but they're soft, and they just charge $5/GB over the cap, to a maximum of $30 extra. Most people I know just factor the extra $30 into their bill. Personally, I have never hit my cap, although it's a commercial cap. ^_^ 200 GB/mo.