Gov't Docs Reveal Canada's Net Neutrality Enforcement Failure

An anonymous reader writes "An investigation into the enforcement of Canada's net neutrality rules reveals that virtually all major Canadian ISPs have been the target of complaints, but there have been few, if any, consequences arising from the complaints process. Michael Geist obtained internal CRTC documents on all net neutrality complaints and found that Rogers was the top target, primarily for throttling access to World of Warcraft. Other notable cases include Bell throttling access to hotfile.com and Barrett Xplore, a satellite Internet provider, rendering VoIP unusable. Despite the revelations, there have no fines, no audits, and the CRTC has even refused to investigate some cases that appear to raise obvious net neutrality concerns."

Comments

Bell sucks

[Tsingi]

Bell Canada was fined recently for lying in advertising about how much their services cost. They were levied a fairly huge fine, several millions of dollars. They refer to this as an "Administrative" cost.

Internet in Canada is expensive and slow, and it will stay that way until the CRTC stops pandering to Bell and Rogers.

Regulators

[Hatta]

Regulators should be like engineers, personally responsible for a failure to do their jobs. They should be paid well enough to accept those risks. This will draw more competent people away from lucrative public sector jobs, and ensure that they actually do the job they are required to by law.

As of now, if a regulator refuses to enforce regulations, what recourse do people have? They are not elected, so we can't vote them out.

For remote locations it's great!

[Wrexs0ul]

I work with a couple oil companies here in Alberta, and at their drilling sites you'll usually only have internet via a shared connection from data logging companies.

You barely get high-speed, but if you use a lower quality codec and are careful about setup the call quality is as good as a cell phone call. Which compared to nothing makes satellite internet awesome! :)

-Matt

Re:VOIP via satellite?

[wolrahnaes]

My thoughts exactly. VoIP is my day job and I can tell you that once pings exceed 200ms things get questionable. If there's low jitter, it can work and just have a delay like old intercontinental satellite PSTN links, but usually this is not the case. Any satellite connection using fixed dishes and thus geostationary satellites (a.k.a. everything marketed to home users) has an absolute minimum latency caused by the "last mile" of 472ms. This could only be achieved at the equator, anywhere else would be farther away and have greater latency but I don't feel like doing the math for Canadian latitudes.

tl;dr: VoIP on consumer satellite internet connections is stupid, end of story.

Re:Who's being paid off?

[Toze]

Money, hell; follow the employers. The CRTC's Vicechairman of Telecom worked for Rogers for 17 years. The Ontario regional commissoner worked for Alliance Atlantis, Atlantic/Nunavut was VP of Access, Quebec spent two decades at CBC, and Manitoba/Sask spent two decades at SaskTel. http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/about/commissioners.htm Not to say the whole batch of 'em are crooked, but it seems like half the commissioners they've got don't just have industry experience, they worked for the companies they're now in charge of regulating. I don't know about you, but the Rogers group not even being /investigated/ for egregious harm to network access, while the CRTC telecom VP used to work for them, seems mighty suspicious.

Money buys power, again.

[rlglende]

We have more than 100 years of evidence wrt the effectiveness of regulations.

Are there ANY successes? How do these successes compare to the failures, e.g. the 100s of 1000s of people that the FDA's regulations kill every year via inhibiting the development of new drugs and protecting drug manufacturers from competition and the resulting high prices.

Money buys power in all times and places. So far as I can see, the only way to prevent that is to limit the power of the gov to the absolute minimum that is consistent with civilization. We should be experimenting with that lower edge of gov power, as the "sky's the limit" edge we are on has proven a failure in all cases it has been tried in.

They're apparently learning from the USA

[dkleinsc]

It's very simple: Have the laws on the books, but don't enforce them. That way, congressmen / MPs can go back to their district / riding and announce that they've gotten some law passed to deal with a problem, but your pals in industry don't have to actually deal with the law.

There were lots of laws that the SEC and Federal Reserve could have used to squash down much of the real estate bubble. They didn't use them. After the fact, there were people and organizations who had committed criminal fraud, and the "Justice" Department has refused to investigate them. There were laws on the book that the MSHA could have used to prevent the Upper Big Branch Mine disaster in West Virginia. They didn't use them, despite lots of evidence that the owner of the mine routinely violated the law and then bribed the judges in the state to ensure that they were effectively immune from lawsuits. There are laws on the books saying that torturing people is illegal. A few grunts have been prosecuted for it, but those giving the orders have gotten off without even a cursory investigation.

Sad to see Harper go that route though. I thought the Canadians had more resistance to the blending of corporate and government power that's so prevalent in the US.

Um...

[Mashiki]

So we have misleading headlines, and misleading stuff by Geist again. Big shock. Here's the thing, we don't have net neutrality rules in Canada. There are voluntary guidelines. And people got 'upset' and threw a hissyfit the last time the conservatives were going to rip the mandate away from the CRTC on internet related stuff.

And yet the CRTC is continuing the status-quo. So what's the problem fellow Canucks? You want one, but don't want anyone to do anything about it. And you don't want those 'evil conservatives' to remove the mandate but you want the CRTC scrapped.

You blow my fucking mind.

I suppose the upside is old Von Cough(Konrad von Finckenstein), will be gone in a little bit with a new chairman.

so how do you deal with "natural" monopolies?

[Chirs]

An unregulated telecom business would have no coverage in rural areas because the density isn't worth the effort. It wouldn't have universal 911, it wouldn't have interoperable services, and you'd have totally unfettered monopolies.

No thanks, telecommunications and utilities should be owned by the people (i.e., the government).

Re:VOIP via satellite?

[BuckaBooBob]

Sorry to rain on your parade... But ping latency has little to do with voice quality(unless you are using a horrid codec that has super crappy buffers...).. most of the quality comes from jitter.. (Packet to packet delay) as long as you have a fairly steady stream of packets moving (IE your buffers don't run empty then get a wack load of packets then go empty for a while again) You quality should be fine... if there is a large amount of latency you will start to get an echo if poor/cheap handsets are used... but with a proper/robust echo cancellation this can be overcome... But once you start hitting 800+ ms of latency the talking delays do get annoying but the quality is still there.. Please stop using latency as a measurement of VOIP quality... what your really looking at is jitter... on FDD networks with high latency thats usually a sign of high congestion and you will get alot of packet clumping which is the real reason why quality starts to go to crap(The codec can't handle that amount of clumping hence the inconsistent quality of the VOIP call)...