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What Canada Can Teach the US About Net Neutrality
blottsie writes If there are two ways in which the Internet is similar in the United States and Canada, it's that it's slow and expensive in both places relative to many developed countries. The big difference, however, is that Canada is looking into doing something about it. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission—the northern equivalent of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)— is examining how the wholesale market, where smaller Internet service providers (ISPs) use parts of bigger companies' networks to sell their own services, should operate in the years ahead. The industry reaction to this proposal provides insights to the potential consequences of re-classifying broadband in the U.S. as a Title II public utility.
In terms of net neutrality, the CRTC did a heck of a lot more than commission a study, they put their ITMP framework into effect. It's essentially regulation requiring net neutrality be preserved. It's been enforced in the past (when the country's largest cable company was throttling some online games) and has issues currently under review (for a case where mobile phone companies were not counting their own video streaming apps against transfer caps, but were counting apps like Netflix).
It wasn't complicated or simple. We didn't have network neutrality. Then they put some straightforward regulation into effect, and then we did have network neutrality, and a framework for what consumers can do when they need to report a violation.
It's worth noting that the CRTC review of both of the net neutrality violations that I mentioned above were instigated by regular consumers filing a complaint, without any lawyers getting involved (on the consumer side). In the first case, the CRTC ruled against the cableco, and in the second case it's still in progress.
Of course S.Korea has an internet capability funded by the government with multiple low cost loans provided to infrastructure builders over the past 20 years. In addition they have actively blocked any moves towards monopoly status.
There is only one correct definition and the rest is noise. Net neutrality is the idea that all packets get equal treatment, regardless of source, destination, or anything in the packet's payload (especially in layers 4+).
Net neutrality has _absolutely_nothing_ to do with usage-based billing or unlimited rates or flat throttling of all traffic after reaching some threshold. This is where I think all the confusion is.
Basically, it's the principle of treading network traffic as a dumb utility like water, where the only metric which should be used to make any sort of decisions (and bills) is the volume; the number of bits moving in and out of a port.