Liberal Party of Canada Comes Out In Support of Net Neutrality 142
Posted
by
Soulskill
from the free-tubes-eh dept.
from the free-tubes-eh dept.
bryxal writes "The Liberal Party of Canada, currently leading in most polls, has announced yesterday that it supports Net Neutrality, saying, 'Internet management should be neutral and not be permitted for anti-competitive behaviour, nor should it target certain websites, users, providers or legitimate software applications. We must protect the openness and freedom of the internet, and maintain competition to spur innovation, improve service levels and reduce costs to users.'"
You don't care until your Skype is blocked.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Legitimate Software Applications (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:wow (Score:3, Interesting)
I am glad that you brought up mandatory minimums. It would appear as though they have the summer to mull over the bill.
Alberta's law against sane education and basically the whole state of affairs up here is certainly a cause for election.
After the liberal vote on mandatory minimums it would appear that the only party supporting legalization is the NDP.
However, unfortunately step 1 is getting the conservatives out of power.
Re:Meaningless blather (Score:3, Interesting)
NetNeutrality=good; the legislation=not so much (Score:1, Interesting)
Don't be surprised that the first truly large forms of Internet censorship on a large scale occur because of net neutrality legislation. Ironic.
Right now, the government is not responsible for Internet content to any real extent. A net neutrality law essentially says 'Government, you make things right about that content stuff'. At first, this will be a good thing. "No censorship" it will say. But then, the politics show their true form. Someone will say, "you can't censor child porn because of net neutrality laws". The conservatives will push through an exception that forces censorship of child porn. Think of the children. Someone will say, "you can't censor pro-tobacco messages to children because of net neutrality laws". The liberals will push through an exception to censor tobacco messages. Think of the children. Then the next thing. Then the next. The government will, over time, take it to levels that today's QOS policy for VOIP look like innocent play.
Sorry to be pessimistic, but it opens a Pandora's box. Governments love laws. Lobbyists love laws. So, the question I ask myself is: is the net neutrality problem today better or worse than the net neutrality problem we would get with a law? Hard to predict. I suspect that things are not bad enough yet to make a law a good idea.