Canadians Organizing a Rally For Net Neutrality 125
taylortbb writes "Canadians are fighting back against Bell Canada's traffic shaping (recentlly discussed by Slashdot here and here) by organizing a rally in support of network neutrality. The rally is being backed by a long list of organizations including Google, two major political parties, three ISPs, and two major unions. It's set for Tuesday at 11:30am on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. The only question that remains is, will the government listen?"
Re:yay (Score:4, Insightful)
You could start a petition, send it off to whatever ISP you are under, wether they are involved or not, couldnt hurt, provided you arent rude about it.
The market is neutral, Government is anything but! (Score:4, Insightful)
The internet can not be any more neutral than when it is left to markets.
The problem with it at the moment, is it is already too regulated in most countries. (Eg, the US)
Re:yay (Score:4, Insightful)
If you can't make it, you can't make it. There is still a venue for involvement if you want to help out [democraticmedia.ca].
Re:The market is neutral, Government is anything b (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously this is not about putting the government in charge, its about allowing the internet to remain open. How in the world would it be more neutral if the markets get their way? The markets are proving they can not stay neutral, they want more money without doing any work such as upgrading infrastructure. Obviously, they can't stay neutral because they will always choose what makes them more money, thats not neutral. If the government steps in and says "quit messing with the traffic that goes through the tubes" that will force them to stay neutral.
Really, not everything the government does is this horrible plot to enslave humanity and yes, corporations step out of line from time to time and need to be slapped back down. This is a perfect example of such a time.
Re:yay (Score:5, Insightful)
Look at all the hoopla over the DMCA in the US and it's injection in multiple forms around the world. Lots of hype on the web, but no governmental changes anywhere. Zippo.
Naked Korean Pussies And Gay Nigger Chimps Sodomy (Score:0, Insightful)
The stupid, fat, lazy, and brainwashed Americans will continue to take it in the ass. You could have $50 a gallon gas prices and people would complain, they would post to their blog and make videos for YouTube. They would bitch, moan, walk into stores and wring their fists at other Americans working retail and day-to-day service jobs and take it verbally out on them like they do today, instead of confronting the issue together. With Katrina we saw the reality which bubbles underneath the masturbatory Hollywood America. The television continues to control the minds and the people parrot back and forth whatever the television says, usually with a tiny opinion of their own, but little more.
They dont think, they are trained to consume, what they are given they accept and they dont challenge authority, they are mentally beaten and assaulted with powerful advertising on a daily basis and are so used to it they often mix commercial content and slogans or jingles in with their daily lifes communication.
Nothing will improve unless the people turned off their televisions, stopped parroting, stopped blogging about their ingrown toenail and how much they hate choice A and B and how terrible everything is and how they continue to FUND the issues they hate while they bitch about it and do NOTHING.
Unless you get together, turn off your televisions, stop being programmed by the rich corporations and political deviants, you arent going to change. Your system is constructed to contain you in a cage. You can disagree and feel you are somehow different, but if you are paying taxes and doing nothing to change the system, you are as broken, immoral, and to blame as the ones who commit the evils you claim to despise.
Raise the gas prices to $100 a gallon, raise the milk to $30 a gallon, it wont matter, the Americans will do nothing, they will continue to sit back while their taxes pay for drones to fly and spot marijuana so the DEA can continue busting non violent pot smokers and lady justice can throw them in jail to get violently sodomized and forced to suck gang members pensies and maybe leave jail with a nice disease, rather than get together, switch off corporate television, and think for themselves and shape their nation with their own minds.
No, they will continue to go to Youtube and post stupid videos of them sharing their thoughts about things they hate which their taxes continue to fund, post blogs about their stupid lives which fund the system they hate, and talk about choices A and B which are parties which are not people friendly, but corporate friendly.
You are fucked, and you will continue to deny it. When faced with the facts you will either (A) Ignore it, (B) Mock it, (C) Argue it, (D) Launch personal attacks, (E) remain in denial, (F) Lace it with humor, (G) Or another cowardly response.
Enjoy your mess.
Re:The market is neutral, Government is anything b (Score:2, Insightful)
However, there are restrictions in certain regions on which providers you can go to because these providers have been given a monopoly.
This is the problem with the American market, a lot of these companies have been given monopoly, and so you have no choice.
Additionally, since their profit model is setup around providing this neutrality, they will not be as profitable as before, and so they will have an argument to levy taxes or give them a greater monopoly.
Further more, their businesses are doing this so they can provide the unlimited plans you enjoy. If their hands are tied, it is likely you will get plans that are limited in other ways.
So lets go over this...
Instead of deregulating and having a choice, you choose more regulation which will most likely have little effect anyway, narrow your choices and increase your average costs?
Does that about sum it up?
Business is not stupid, no matter what it will be profitable, the only variable left is whether you want the ability to choose?
Good work so far (Score:4, Insightful)
Rallies like this usually get a good amount of attention. Furthermore, there is some political backing (check out the speaker list) and there has already been a lot of coverage for this rally before it has begun. Plus, being on the Hill, it draws a lot of public attention from newspapers, local workers, etc.. Every time a protest comes through the downtown core, I can hear it and always wonder what it's about.
So even if the government does nothing immediately, which is expected, this rally has already been extremely successful at bringing the issue to the Canadian public. This is all over the news and will be throughout the day. I would call that a success already.
Re:yay (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:yay (Score:3, Insightful)
anyways theres infighting in palestine because israel is strangling the country to death. Half are calling it quits and half refuse to bow to pressure. So israel gives weapons to some of them. And if a peace might be forming they go in with a few hundred troops and obliterate a town to increase ire. Then to suck up to the reasonable palestinians they say they'll talk peace.... but that doesnt stop them from building cities on palestinian land or running more tank raids into towns.
Lebanon was kown as the gem of the middle east since the 80s
Any country that applauds getting 15:1 kill ratios in a battle is not a good guy. Please think about it.
This is exactly anticompetitive (Score:5, Insightful)
Result: Customers leave Bell for ISP's that aren't interfering with their traffic
Action: Bell then institutes throttling and other abusive behavior against the other ISP's customers
Result: Customers have nowhere to go. Other ISP's may not lose so many customers (because there's no good alternative), but they also wouldn't gain the customers that would otherwise be coming in because of superior service.
In a nutshell, the third-party ISP's need to use Bell's infrastructure. As such, they cannot offer anything better than Bell in those regards. Their main competing points were the additional features offered that Bell was not offering (or was cutting back on), with non-throttled service being one of the key points. As Bell has removed their ability to offer such service, they have, in-fact, removed the third-party ISP's as competitors in this arena.
How is this NOT anti-competitive? Is it OK so long as it's "we're going to make everyone suck as much as us so that customers don't move elsewhere" instead of "we're going to make everyone else suck more so that customers come to us instead"
Both are equally anti-competitive and discriminatory.
Re:yay (Score:2, Insightful)
Unless the people who are being suppressed are given access to conventional weapons of war like F16's, tanks and attack helicopters, then do not expect them to fight a conventional war.
One last point; Keep your Trolls to yourself.
Re:yay (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Back off ! (Score:3, Insightful)
Thats like saying for the government you dont have to obey the rules of the road because you bought a car (private property) but everywhere you use it on the roads is public property.
Basically they've been given money to build infrastructure and keep it up to date... If they cant handle streaming video and torrents and what not then obvious they've failed to keep it up to date. Maybe a legislative smackdown telling them they cant fiddle with throttling will encourage them to upgrade the infrastructure once again rather than milk it for all its worth like Comcast in the states.
Re:yay (Score:3, Insightful)
Have you ever seen what Judeo-Christian texts say to do with heretics? It's not pretty.
Re:I'm not your friend, buddy! (Score:3, Insightful)
Do you not agree that "last mile" carriers for both DSL and cable actively throttling and using DPI to shape the traffic of their wholesale customers creates a situation where I cannot get unfucked-with bandwidth at a reasonable cost? Now I don't quite agree that unfucked-with bandwidth is necessarily a right, but when the government-sanctioned monopolies of the last mile are also a supplier to the end-user, I think that is an unfair market, and *that* is something the government is in control of.
I'm genuinely curious if Bell believes that DPI and throttling of their commercial customers (not just their wholesale providers) is acceptable, too. I.e. if I get my own 10 meg LAN extension to a server at 151 Front, and my provider there is cross-connected with Bell... would Bell feel justified in throttling traffic to/from my IP into their network?