Canadian ISPs Speak Out Against Net Neutrality 213
Ars Technica reports on a proceeding being held by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission regarding net neutrality. They requested comments from the public as part of the debate, and several Canadian ISPs took the opportunity to explain why they think it's a bad idea. Quoting:
"One of the more interesting responses came from an ISP called Videotron, which told the CRTC that controlling access to content ... 'could be beneficial not only to users of Internet services but to society in general.' As examples of such benefits, Videotron mentioned the control of spam, viruses, and child pornography. It went on to suggest that graduated response rules — kicking users off the 'Net after several accusations of copyright infringement — could also be included as a benefit to society in general. ... Rogers, one of Canada's big ISPs, also chimed in and explained that new regulations might limit its ability to throttle P2P uploads, which it does at the moment. 'P2P file sharing is designed to cause network congestion,' says the company. 'It contributes significantly to latency, thereby making the network unreliable for certain users at periods of such congestion.'"
That's Videotron for you (Score:5, Informative)
Anyone who's dealt with Videotron before recognizes their double speak. They have a long history of draconian practices such as capping the bandwidth of their users at a very low level, preventing the use of *any* sort of server, charging $50 per static IP you request, etc.
They go out of their way to rip off their users and then try to impose the same draconian measures on their competitors in order to discourage users from jumping ship. The same applies to Bell.
The Canadian government should outlaw any one company from owning *both* the infrastructure and service components of media services. Right now Bell is abusing their monopoly on phone lines to lock competitors out of the ADSL space and Videotron monopolizes its control of cable lines to lock competitors out of the TV space.
"We own the pipes"? (Score:2, Informative)
Net Neutrality vs QoS (Score:5, Informative)
No. Net Neutrality ensures no discrimination based on traffic source or destination. This has nothing to do with Quality of Service filtering, which is discrimination based on traffic type. They can still throttle my P2P all they like, they just can't throttle my access to YouTube because YouTube didn't pony up some "high traffic site fee".
Re:Net Neutrality vs QoS (Score:2, Informative)
> What happens if they decide to throttle voip traffic due to 'network congestion', but the start of such throttling just happens to coincide with the launch of their own voip service? It has to be an open pipe, period.
He's saying that they have to deal with ALL VoIP the same. So they can throttle VoIP, but they have to do it for theirs, as well. They can't cut someone a special deal to uncap it.
Canadian Net Neutrality Coalition (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.saveournet.ca/ [saveournet.ca] for supporting net neutrality in Canada.
Re:Stop overselling (Score:4, Informative)
I think this illustrates how few people understand how consumer broadband works.
The reason consumer broadband is so cheap is that bandwidth is actually shared in pools of people. It's not like having a business-class connection where you have dedicated lines, a guaranteed speed (ie. 1.5MB/s per person), and the price to reflect it.
Consumer broadband is different. Allocate 50MBs to a pool of people, and cap each person at 5MB/s. With casual net usage, that's not a problem. Games are low in bandwidth, and web surfing produces sporadic spikes of intense bandwidth usage. At 50MB/s, you could get maybe a thousand simultaneous users. They all download their pages at blazing speeds, and have low latency on their games. Because its shared, the price is cheap too.
But if you introduce something like bittorrent into that consumer broadband usage model, then we have a problem. Because now, it only takes a relative few to clog up the entire allocated 50MB/s.
ISPs like Rogers who used pool resources are now faced with a dilemma: how you maintain speeds for everyone, while keeping the price low - for everyone? They've chosen to throttle connections. Is it right? Perhaps not.
But it's important to understand that the issue is just not as black and white as some would like it to be. I'm for net neutrality, in terms of being blind to who the end IP is. I don't want Site X to be slower because they didn't pay Rogers a premium. However, I'm not against traffic shaping high-bandwidth services. If you want the bandwidth so bad, then pay for a line with guaranteed speeds.
Re:Stop overselling (Score:2, Informative)
Then why is it that I can get service that is not capped and is not shaped from TekSavvy? They are already paying almost all of the cost as fees to Bell (their profit margin is extremely low, they have to work with volume of subscriptions) and they are $20+ cheaper in order to compete in the market. On top of that their support isn't a fucking joke.
Oh, right, it's because Bell and Rogers are making a fortune overselling their shitty service and not spending anything to increase capacity or to have useful tech support.
Re:People with handcuffs and shackles on (Score:5, Informative)
Videotron (Quebecor) pretty much *is* the media company. A branch of it anyway.
And I saw people wonder why the local media wasn't picking up on this around here. Quebecor owns half the press and TV channels.
Re:Net neutrality (Score:5, Informative)
No it's not. Bad analogy. Actually horrid analogy. As bad as the famous ted stevens dump trucks and tubes idea.
Roads are considered "public" because they are paid for with public funds. If a company somehow was able to own 100 miles of land and build a nice freeway on it with their own money, they certainly could charge whatever they want to whoever they want. And subscriber-only lanes would be totally legal.
Certainly some network pipes are bought and paid for with taxpayer dollars. But a lot of trunks are real investments on the part of the telcos. Granted there is a certain amount of government-granted monopoly status going on here... there are only so many right of ways, etc.
The real issue involves dishonest double-dipping. ISPs and telcos want to charge you twice for everything you do, and charge companies like Google twice as well. They also want the right to sell you what purports to be connection you can transmit any kind of data on, and then turn around and intentionally slow certain kinds of traffic, or charge you more for certain kinds of data. Kickbacks from companies willing to pay to get their content delivered faster are then given an artificial advantage over others. This behavior might be barely legal, depending on racketeering laws, but certainly isn't ethical.
Re:want the old slashdot back? (Score:1, Informative)
Having a lower uid doesn't mean you've been around longer, just that your account's been around longer. Plenty of /. readers never bother making an account.
Re:Stop overselling (Score:3, Informative)
Many ISPs, including (from TFS) Rogers, do ... [QoS shaping]. What they're saying is that if in the future they're not allowed to do this, by law, then they don't know what they'll do instead.
TFS seems to suggest Rogers is capping the torrents, which is a different practice altogether (and in reality, has more to do with limiting how much they have to pay tier 1s than congestion, QoS works fine for that).
If I'm wrong, and Rogers is really just trying to streamline the network, my attitude torwards them needs some adjustment, but in practice my ISP (who I know de prioritizes torrents, like any sane network should) has no trouble giving me my entire bandwidth cap 90% of the time.
Net neutrality does pose a lot of problems for ISPs who are trying to give customers what they want though, and the problem really should be dealt with with existing contract and extortion laws should be used, leaving legislation as a last resort if that fails.