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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.
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!
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
Can't reach _any_ Michael Geist sites (from either my cable and DSL conns). Coincidence? I think not!!!
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.
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.
You're the first to do it, and bringing up an obscure sub department of Army R&D is very very stretching it.
"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?
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.
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?
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.