Canada's Telco Bell Tried To Have VPNs Banned During NAFTA Negotiations (techdirt.com)

Telecom company Bell urged the Canadian government to formulate rules that would make some VPN services illegal in the country ahead of North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) negotiations. The rationale behind the request? It doesn't want people in the country to use VPNs to access the US catalog of some streaming services like Netflix. TechDirt, quotes a paywalled report: "In its submission, Bell argued that Canadians accessing content from a US service with a VPN 'unjustly enriches the US service, which has not paid for the Canadian rights' but nonetheless makes that content available to Canadians. Bell's media arm reportedly spends millions on content for it streaming service, Crave TV, which allows Canadians to stream content from American networks such as HBO and Showtime."

Again though, it's not the VPN doing that. And if you want to stop users from flocking to better content catalogs elsewhere on the continent, you should focus your ire on the things causing that to happen -- like increasingly dated and absurd geo-viewing restrictions, and your own substandard content offerings that fail to adequately match up.

Comments

Most Canadians call it Bell Canada

[WillAffleckUW]

I've noticed a number of posts recently by people unfamiliar with the country they are posting news about, where they use non-standard methods to describe it.

In Canada, one refers to them as Bell Canada.

On a related note, there is a vast difference between the University of Columbia and Columbia University.

Bell Canada

[drinkypoo]

It's not "Bell", it's "Bell Canada". They were simply the Canadian arm of the American Bell Telephone Company until 1975. Sounds like they still have the spirit of the original... You know, "We don't care, we don't have to, we're the phone company."

Re:Taco Bell

[Translation Error]

Taco Bell was the only ISP to survive the net neutrality war.