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Net Neutrality Bill Introduced In Canadian Parliament 132

Posted by Soulskill from the aboot-time dept.
FeatherBoa points out that the New Democratic Party in Canada has introduced legislation to limit the amount of control Canadian ISPs can exert over their subscribers. The bill would amend the Telecommunications Act to "prohibit network operators from engaging in network management practices that favour, degrade or prioritize any content, application or service transmitted over a broadband network based on its source, ownership or destination, subject to certain exceptions." Support for net neutrality in Canada has been building for quite a while now. Quoting CBC News: "'This bill is about fairness to consumers,' said Charlie Angus, the NDP's digital spokesman. It also looks to prohibit 'network operators from preventing a user from attaching any device to their network and requires network operators to make information about the user's access to the internet available to the user.' The proposed bill makes exception for ISPs to manage traffic in reasonable cases, Angus said, such as providing stable speeds for applications such as gaming or video conferencing."
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Net Neutrality Bill Introduced In Canadian Parliament More

Net Neutrality Bill Introduced In Canadian Parliament

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  • The obvious question follows, (Score:5, Insightful)

    by NoobixCube ( 1133473 ) on Friday May 30, 2008 @01:13AM (#23596587) Journal
    Just what are these "certain exceptions"? The very fact there are exceptions, even if they aren't related to freedoms now, should be a little worrying, since the exceptions can probably be added to.

    • Re:The obvious question follows, (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 30, 2008 @01:34AM (#23596663)
      On the other hand, the two exceptions listed in the summary make it pretty clear that straight up net neutrality isn't the best idea. Different services have different QoS requirements, and defining which ones are ok to support by law hinders future innovation.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by ultranova ( 717540 )

        On the other hand, the two exceptions listed in the summary make it pretty clear that straight up net neutrality isn't the best idea. Different services have different QoS requirements, and defining which ones are ok to support by law hinders future innovation.

        Wrong. It simply makes it neccessary to tailor these future innovations to fit the Internet - that is, to the already-used programs - rather than require that the Internet conforms to them. Furthermore, if you Irene ISP leases a 10 megabit/second

        • Agreed, but realistically there should be two indicators: the minimum, guaranteed bandwidth, and a maximum or peak.

          Right now, I'm on 10mbit cable. I could go about my daily affairs just fine with, say, 2 mbit. If the ISP can guarantee, in writing, that I will always have 2 mbit available for whatever use, with the remaining 8 mbit subject to possible congestion, I'd probably be fine with it. The 2 mbit dedicated chunk would ensure my VoIP, gaming and regular web surfing are protected.

          It's when "ISPs" lik
      • Precisely. I would also support a bill that allows companies to shape traffic as much as they like so long as they are required, via the bill, to make customers aware of this fact before money exchanges hands.

        I am all about a free and open Internet and I'm also all about consumer rights. I am also about business rights. I know there is a lot of conflict of interest between commercial entities and "the people" but on a fundamental level business exists by the people with the function of serving the people. T

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Touvan ( 868256 )
        I don't think there is a need for exceptions. It's monumentally easier (and probably cheaper) to just increase bandwidth across the board (over time), and decrease latency (over time) across the board.

        I see no need to shape traffic in any way. Any current technology will work fine within current constraints, and future technology will be build to take advantage of the constraints of their time (which would improve).

        This all misses the real issue anyway - the guys who own the highways also want to use those
        • Laying Cable takes time. It is very expensive and often a time consuming process and usually requires permits to dig, etc, and can get tied up in red tape for a long time. Likewise, routing hardware can be pretty expensive for systems handling ISP-sized loads. If an area has unexpected growth, or is rezoned after the cables are laid, and the permits to lay new cable to upgrade an area don't come fast enough, then how are ISP's supposed to deal with that growth?

          The process of throttling traffic is not ev

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Touvan ( 868256 )
            I think from what I've read above, you'd be happy if they were to throttle all internet in an area, to keep access alive for everyone.

            For example, if one guy on the block is using too much bandwidth on p2p, the equipment would throttle him down (all of him), so he doesn't clog it up for the guy next door who just wants to check email - and would do so pretty much only when the guy gets on and wants to check his email - and hopefully only throttles him down enough to let others on, but doesn't penalize him i

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by elnico ( 1290430 )
      If they seriously wanted to erode away at the people's rights through these bogeyman "exceptions", why would they have introduced this bill in the first place?

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Vectronic ( 1221470 )
        To make it look like they are "doing good for the people"

        There may not be many amendments now, but they could easily already have ones in queue.

        "W00t great idea" now, 3 years from now "damnit, turns out that was a shitty idea"

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by jeffasselin ( 566598 )
          This is the NPD, not the US Republican Party. Unbelievable, maybe, to a jaded American, but some politicians do actually have the best interests of the public and of their voters in mind.

          Exceptions are a necessary part of any rule. Absolutes are (almost) never a good idea. Any amendments to the exceptions would have to go through the parliamentary process, just as this law will have to go through, just as an abrogation of this law might eventually go through.

          • This is the NPD, not the US Republican Party.
            I agree, they most likely have the best intentions. However, being the NDP, there is very little chance that they will be able to get this bill passed before they go shrieking on about some other issue. Seriously, has Jack Layton ever managed to get anything passed?
          • I guess I must be a jaded Canadian because when I hear "NDP" the last thing I think of is th peoples best interests.
            • The NDP ALWAYS has the best interests of the people in mind on every individual bill they introduce. The problem is they don't have their other bills in mind, or have any idea on what is required to implement those bills, and as a result, the people go broke, and/or their new laws end up failing once passed.

              Competence should not be mistaken for how much someone cares. If the NDP had Competence, I'd probably vote for them.

              • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

                by digitrev ( 989335 )
                Actually, I slightly disagree with you. The NDP always has what they think are the best interests of the people in mind when they introduce bills. Of course, being the NDP, this means that everyone will be wary about touching it. Canadians, get out your pen and paper, and write to the following people:
                • Your Local MP [parl.gc.ca]
                • Stephen Harper
                • Jack Layton
                • Stephane Dion
                • Gilles Duceppe
                  and ask them to support this bill. Remember, mailing your MP requires no postage, and they tend to take written letters over e-mail anywa
          • The NDP's sole interest is to discredit whichever government is in power, because it's never the NDP. They find the dumbest, most inflammatory redneck they can dig up, stick him on a podium and let the insults fly.

            They will never hold power, and while it's good to have someone rocking the boat to keep the leaders in check and avoid stagnation, the NDP has yet to do it in any measure of skill and success.

  • Paper Tiger (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Tubal-Cain ( 1289912 ) on Friday May 30, 2008 @01:13AM (#23596589) Journal

    ...subject to certain exceptions.
    Doesn't this one line pretty much negate most of the positive potential in this bill?

    • Re:Paper Tiger (Score:4, Insightful)

      by elnico ( 1290430 ) on Friday May 30, 2008 @01:35AM (#23596667)

      The proposed bill makes exception for ISPs to manage traffic in reasonable cases
      Doesn't this one word pretty much negate your needless cynicism?

      The point of the bill is to ensure that network flow happens in whatever way is most beneficial to the people instead of whatever way makes the most money for the ISP. Do you seriously think that there is no case in which the population experiences a gain from carefully exercised traffic shaping?

  • When asked for comments, (Score:5, Funny)

    by name*censored* ( 884880 ) on Friday May 30, 2008 @01:14AM (#23596593)
    Several celebrities came out in favour of the ammendment, stating that they were "excited, because their online content would now deliver all this new internet money". Other celebrities were not as elated about this bill, arguing that "You're not my buddy, guy".

    • Several celebrities came out in favour of the ammendment, stating that they were "excited, because their online content would now deliver all this new internet money". Other celebrities were not as elated about this bill, arguing that "You're not my buddy, guy".
      Your not my Guy, Friend

  • Canadians only support net neutrality... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Jimbob The Mighty ( 1282418 ) on Friday May 30, 2008 @01:23AM (#23596629)
    because they think it's an ice-hockey term (Sorry MetaMystics).

  • the state of things (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dsanfte ( 443781 ) on Friday May 30, 2008 @01:27AM (#23596645) Journal
    Disclaimer: I'm a card-carrying NDP member.

    Now on to things...

    I was at the TekSavvy Net Neutrality rally in Ottawa on May 27th. While it was a great rally, we found ourselves competing against a parliamentary sex scandal for press coverage. Sex sells. Arcane concepts like net traffic throttling don't, so much.

    Let's look at reality. Customers of most ISPs in Canada are now traffic-shaped, with a few exceptions:

    Videotron[Cable] (which substitutes shaping for a 50GB usage cap on a 50Mbps/1Mbps Docsis2.0 connection)
    Telus[DSL]
    A few ISPs such as Primus[DSL-wholesaler] and Colba[DSL-wholesaler] with their own equipment in Bell DSLAMS

    There's a workaround to bypass Bell's throttling using MLPPP, only for subscribers to TekSavvy[DSL-wholesaler], but it requires some Linux-savvy or a modded router. To their credit, I believe Acanac[DSL-wholesaler] has set up an ssh tunnel for the same effect.

    Otherwise, Bell[DSL] and Rogers[Cable] both shape encrypted traffic on their networks.

    I see a lot of opposition for Net Neutrality regulations from people concerned about their impact on VOIP and such. Well, that's what exceptions in the law are for! Good on the NDP for finally stepping up to bat on this issue. That makes them the only party in parliament who can be bothered to take notice.

    To anyone still opposed: Look at the massive, pervasive presence of the Internet in people's everyday lives, especially those under 30. It's about time we started treating it as an essential service. It's become one. Essential services (generally) have their quality regulated by government, and this bill is a step in the right direction.

    Let's face facts. Canada is falling behind in the quality and penetration of broadband service. It's time to force the greedy telcos to invest in infrastructure instead of trying to save money by throttling their users and degrading the network for everyone!

    • Re: (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Ogemaniac ( 841129 )
      I hate net neutrality. Not only in principle, but in practice. I WANT my neighbor's porn-and-bittorrent diet throttled, so that when I use our shared resource (our local chunk of bandwidth), it actually works. "Net neutrality" is just a cry for the bandwidth hogs to screw it up for the rest of us.

      • Re:the state of things (Score:5, Insightful)

        by iCEBaLM ( 34905 ) on Friday May 30, 2008 @06:03AM (#23597667)
        If the service was sold to your neighbour as being unlimited, then he should be able to use it in any way he wishes. It's not your neighbours fault for using the service he paid for, it's the ISPs fault for not providing you the service you paid for. If they are overselling lines, which they are because every ISP does it, then ISPs are gambling on the fact that 90% of their subscribers only browse a few pages and use email.

      • Re:the state of things (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Jurily ( 900488 ) <jurily AT gmail DOT com> on Friday May 30, 2008 @07:39AM (#23598123)
        There is no such thing as a bandwidth hog with an unlimited plan.

        If I pay for it, it's not my fault anymore. It's the overselling telco's.

      • Re:the state of things (Score:5, Informative)

        by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Friday May 30, 2008 @07:47AM (#23598173) Journal
        You clearly have no understanding of what net neutrality entails, so please stop talking about it.

        First of all, the concept of 'shared resources' between you and your neighbour is a matter for your SLA with your ISP. If they sell you a certain amount of access and they can't provide it because of your neighbour then this is between you and them, and you should probably be advocating that they start charging for total data transferred as many ISPs do. Then, if your neighbour wants to pay a lot more than you, then he can use a lot more of your 'shared resource'. Mind you, if you are living somewhere where one person can make such a noticeable difference then perhaps you should be more interested in network upgrades, something non-neutral network advocates are interested in avoiding.

        Secondly, QoS is nothing to do with network neutrality. Every pipe makes bandwidth versus latency trades. If your neighbour is using a lot of bandwidth then his latency will go up because your packets will have a higher priority. This is nothing to do with network neutrality either.

        Network neutrality is about preventing traffic shaping based on endpoints. Preventing your ISP from prioritising your traffic if it goes to one online music store or news outlet and silently dropping packets and increasing latency if it goes to another one. If you're really happy that your ISP could enter into a partnership with MSN to make their search page load in a second and Google's load in 10 seconds or time out, then that's fine, and you are entitled to your opinion. If you're not, then please shut up about how great a non-neutral network is.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by m.ducharme ( 1082683 )
        Net neutrality isn't just about how much bandwidth the guy down the street is using, it's about control over the content providers as well as the consumers. throttling traffic from p2p clients is just low-hanging fruit. If Bell (for example) gets away with shaping p2p traffic, next they'll claim that VoIP traffic is clogging their tubes, and start to throttle that. Note that VoIP is a direct competitor to Bell's land-line and long distance offerings.

        Similarly, cable companies may decide to throttle traff

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Wildclaw ( 15718 )
        There is nothing about net neutrality that say that you can't shape bandwidth. You just can't shape based on things such as protocol and destination. You can still look at how much is transferred from each user, and give the low bandwidth user preferred treatment.

        Why should someone transferring 50GB via http get better treatment than someone transferring 50GB via bittorrent? People like the parent never seems to be able to answer that question adequatly. Usually spewing some crap about their information bei
    • Colba net only has their DSLAMs for ADSL2, not normal ADSL.

      And the geographic coverage isn't that great for ADSL2 in Montreal (where Colba is).

  • Ineffective. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sedmonds ( 94908 ) on Friday May 30, 2008 @01:36AM (#23596669) Homepage
    http://www2.parl.gc.ca/HousePublications/Publication.aspx?DocId=3524372&Language=e&Mode=1&File=24#1 [parl.gc.ca]

    That's the bill in question.

    In the highly unlikely event that this private members bill makes it through to royal assent, it will have almost no effect. Telecoms will all make use of the exception in clause 2, subsection a:

    (2) Nothing in subsection (1) shall be construed as limiting or restricting the right of a network operator to

    (a) manage the flow of network traffic in a reasonable manner in order to relieve congestion;

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      But it sounds like in order for that to take effect, congestion must first occur. So at worst, they could only manage the flow during peak hours, and who knows what will happen if people sue claiming they are purposefully not updating their networks in order to increase congestion.

      • But it sounds like in order for [subsection (2)(a)] to take effect, congestion must first occur.

        Exactly. Further, according to subsection (4):

        Network operators shall make available [...] information about the user's access to the Internet, including the speed, limitations, and network management practices [...]

        So, in other words, if there is some abuse of subsection (2)(a), the details of it would have to be public, and it could be more easily challenged.

        That being said, it's just a first reading, a

    • Exactly.

      "We have to do it because the network cannot handle the traffic otherwise"

      Then when [someone] says maybe you should invest more in the network, they (the ISP) will claim their infringing their rights of distribution or some damn thing and continue on adding new clients and increasing restrictions/shaping/et al.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by FingerSoup ( 928761 )
        The issue of course, is how you deem a reasonable manner... If for 1 hour of the day, your area is congested, and the other 23 hours of the day, people have a free ride with unrestricted access, and for that hour, a large amount of the congestion is caused by torrent traffic, then I'd say it's reasonable to curb torrents for that hour. on the other hand, oversubscribing an area and having CONSTANT congestion wouldn't fall into this definition. Lets use an analogy to explain in RL

        At a border crossing,

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by TheRecklessWanderer ( 929556 )
      Um, did somebody say NDP? Well, have the NDP ever got something through? I dunno. I kinda doubt it tho. They have great ideals, but no real way to implement them. At least it seems that way to me.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by masamax ( 543884 )
        You might think so, but remember we (as in Canadians, of which I am one) live under a minority government. While its certain the Conservative party would never support this, if the NDP can gain the support of the Liberals and the Bloc (which is entirely possible) this bill will pass.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by wmabey ( 164607 )
          Even if it passes, the Conservatives will take forever to sign it into law. A few months ago, the opposition parties passed a bill obliging the Tories to honour our Kyoto Accord obligations, and that's never received Royal Assent from the governor general.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Pig Hogger ( 10379 )

        Well, have the NDP ever got something through? I dunno.
        How about the universal "deny no one" health insurance system??? You can bet your arse it wasn't the tories (or even the libs) who were responsible for that...
        • I like the NDP and all, but universal health care in Canada was introduced by the Liberals when Trudeau was in power.

          • Wrong. Universal health care was introduced by the Liberal minority government in conjunction with the NDP when Lester Pearson was Prime Minister. Furthermore, the idea was pioneered at the provincial level in Saskatchewan by the CCF, the predecessor of the NDP, when Tommy Douglas was Premier. In short, universal health care was pioneered by the CCF/NDP and completed at the national level by the NDP and Liberals acting together.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by marxmarv ( 30295 )
      Disclaimer: I'm not a Canadian citizen but I've toyed with the idea more than once.

      What are the odds that the telecoms will get regulatory bodies and judges to agree that pay-for-play is "reasonable"? I would recommend getting the words "and non-discriminatory" added if at all possible.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Cutter ( 98008 )
      This bill, as it currently stands, will never pass. It is only had the first reading and will probably change allot by the time it gets to the third reading. Even then if section 2.a is not changed, then the Bells and Rogers can still do rate limiting and have their bit caps.

      • Yes, they can throttle, but they can' throttle just bitorrent. If they start getting congestion, they would have to throttle everything* equally. HTTP. BT, etc. It wouldn't allow them to just throttling bittorrent all day and all night regardless of load levels.

        Also, they would be required to state the "we throttle stuff" publicly.

        *IMO, VOIP should get a do-not-throttle pass.
  • "The proposed bill makes exception for ISPs to manage traffic in reasonable cases..."
    Who gets to decide 'reasonable cases'?
    BT traffic? any encrypted traffic?, whatever ISP's decide traffic they don't like?

    Hopefully there are important details we are missing out on- if not, then you Canadians are fscked over again.
    (no, there is no moral superiority involved here, we in the USA are fscked up even worse!)

    • Re:Everyone onboard!! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by corychristison ( 951993 ) on Friday May 30, 2008 @02:09AM (#23596781)
      'Reasonable cases' is in the area of VOIP.

      One of the biggest concerns is the use of VOIP and the internet interfering with it. Some providers offer a VOIP based service with their internet package.

      This is the 'exception' case that is to be allowed.

      I just don't see how or why people like to scream bloody-fucking-murder on everything. The point is that for once someone (well, a group of people) is finally taking notice to an issue that has been around for a while. I know it's slashdot, but please... grow up.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by NickFortune ( 613926 )

        'Reasonable cases' is in the area of VOIP.

        VOIP might be a reasonable case for prioritising a single protocol, but unless the bill spells specifically states VOIP and nothing else, then it seems likely that the telcos will continue as they are now, and claim each instance of throttling is allowed under the "reasonable cases" provision.

        Hence the question - who decides what's a reasonable case? You clearly have your opinion, the ISPs will almost certainly have a different one, their customers are likely

        • VoIP is part of a broad category of latency-sensitive protocols. Streaming media (e.g. Internet radio) are in the same category, as are games. In contrast, things like BitTorrent or FTP want a lot of bandwidth but don't care much about latency. If your app sets the correct IP flags then it can already choose between these (of course, windows sets both the low latency and high throughput flag for everything).

          There is nothing wrong with ISPs giving priority to latency-sensitive packets. Most of the tim

  • Users decide connection priority? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    What if users could select their own priority settings an a per-application basis? Games, VoIP, video conferencing, etc would be highest priority; web browsing, email, etc would be standard priority; streaming video would be low priority.

    In these cases, I don't mean for the actual bandwidth to be reduced. That would not help the network much anyway, since the same amount of data would be transferred eventually. A lower priority flag would just mean that a delay of a few extra ms, maybe even a second, is acc

  • Bravo but... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Fallen Andy ( 795676 ) on Friday May 30, 2008 @02:41AM (#23596891)
    If we were talking about cars or any other consumer thing then nobody would accept the sort of nonsense we've (not me or the average /.er) been conditioned into accepting.

    Even here in Greece I see typical DSL performance which is to say the least crapulent. Being charitable I'll pretend OTEnet (the former state monopoly) isn't traffic shaping (heh - that's why my torrent of ubuntu dropped dead to 10Kb/s)...

    Funny that it does that after about an hour regardless of time of day...(well not always but too often to be attributable to teh interweb being busy from Greece).

    A car which may or may not be able to hit 100kph with the wind behind it being sold as a Ferrari wouldn't be acceptable (unless you're a retro Citroen freak).

    A Ferrari with three wheels one of which refuses to be circular on wednesdays if we're driving to visit a mistress (hey i'm in southern europe not the puritanical domain of the U.S) wouldn't be acceptable.

    Some traffic shaping is inevitable. But it's a stopgap measure not an acceptable solution. If 90% of new traffic is e.g. bittorrent then the answer is either to make this premium usage (and spell it out in the contract) OR STFU and put more capacity.

    Should be really simple - either *BE* a provider with acceptable use spelled out transparently or *DIE* in the marketplace.

    BTW I think the "exception" is to soften the blow for ISPS so they don't end up sued to death. YMMV. Remember - legislators are mostly (ex optional) sharks^H^H^H^H^Hlawyers so there will always be exceptions. Good luck Canada. Now if we can only persuade the UK to tighten the screws and torch the bloody Phorm thing - which ought to worry everyone much much more than traffic shaping...

    Which leads me to a truly dumb idea. Allocation of the RF spectrum is controlled internationally via the ITU (A UN organization). Given the nature of the Internet shouldn't it be regulated the *same* way? (Running for bomb shelter and donning asbestos undergarments right now...).

    Andy.

    Good use of crap, roses. Bad use of crap - Vista.

  • I mean force internet services to make viewable every last piece of info they store about userA--the entire profile. Off of the top of my head I think that would be a good thing to reign-in the googles of the world... It sounds that they seeking something like that in the bill:

    requires network operators to make information about the user's access to the internet available to the user
    • I think they maybe referring more to your connection speed (ie yes its upto 5Mb or whatever, but what is it actually syncing at?) Line Status: In Service UpTime: Line Profile Name: al2_d2496-2496-256_u640-640-256 Last State Change: Wed May 28 22:00:29 EDT 2008 Operational Status Speed (Kbs) Relative Capacity Occupation (%) Noise Margin (0..31 dB) Signal Power (0-20 dBm) Attenuation (0-60 dB) Block count UpStream 640 71 16.0 12.0 32.0 1.4006229E7 DownStream 2496 68 13.0 15.0 60.0 3.5324464E7

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by colesw ( 951825 )
        *sigh* Hate replying to my own, I should have used preview as it all went together ;)

  • Typo in second paragraph (Score:3, Funny)

    by commodoresloat ( 172735 ) * on Friday May 30, 2008 @03:22AM (#23597039)

    "'This bill is aboot fairness to consumers,' said Charlie Angus, the NDP's digital spokesman.
    Fixed.

    • Re: (Score:1, Redundant)

      by jonaskoelker ( 922170 )
      No, no, no. You're doing it all wrong.

      'This bill is aboot fairness to consumers, eh?' said Charlie Angus, the NDP's digital spokesman.
      There!

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by s66iw ( 1214466 )
      I've been living in the Ottawa region for almost ten years (moved from Montreal) and have yet to hear anyone speak like that. Please enlighten me - tell me where I can hear that fabulous accent?
      • Canadians begin talking like that as soon as they enter this city [wikipedia.org]. Scientists and linguists have so far been unable to explain this phenomenon satisfactorily.
      • Check out the Ottawa Valley, you're more likely to hear it there (at least in Ontario, anyways).

  • Let the user choose... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by GNUPublicLicense ( 1242094 ) on Friday May 30, 2008 @03:53AM (#23597165)

    The idea would be that the IAPs should split their bandwidth fairly among all their users. In its bandwidth share, the user should prioritize its outgoing traffic. The IAP should shape the incomming traffic fairly between each of its user. In this scenario, low latency network applications are dead (video conferencing/telephony/video games...): in an home network lan, the momy is watching a HD internet TV channel, the boy can forget playing online its favorite FPS and the girl cannot have a decent IP phone line call. That's why there is a exception to let the IAP to shape further specifically on low lantency protocols... but they will never be able to embrace all past-present-futur low latency protocols on the net. Of course they could favor only the protocols of big bucks corporations. So you could trash any open low latency protocols...

    But there is a another way: IPv6. Indeed the protocol does have labels that let you tag traffic. Its means the user network apps can tell the IAP equipement what type of traffic they send. So the IAPs can apply shaping rules based on that type of traffic on cross-user boundaries. Nethertheless in a traffic priority class, the IAP still has to provide fairness among users. Basically, fairness among user is not applied on traffic as a whole but on a per traffic class basis.

    Of course in the real world, low latency traffic will have to be shaped to very small bandwidth... smart users would push their P2P traffic on high priority. The idea on high priority traffic classes is to have just enough bandwidth to let signaling, highly compressed voice, intense action FPS game data. Of course, you can have several high priority classes. BUT there is a BIG exception to all of this, emergency services: for instance you want to call from the net the "internet US 911". In this case the IAP equipement will have to know without IPv6 label that you are calling an emergency service (IP based shaping, but amount of IPs must be minimal to avoid overloaded routing tables and increased latency that will degrade internet quality significantly).

    I let you imagine what it will be when users will have Fiber To The Home with upload bandwidth on a 100's of Mb scale!

    This does mean, rewritting many network applications. Deep IAP topology reconfiguration. More expensive IAP equipements: must be able to perform shaping extremely quickly in order to minimize the latency cost(=forget high level protocol shaping or shaping based on too much data(IPs)).

    And the last but not the least... IPv6!

  • filtering (404 checkers)
      throttling ( now ISPs have a video on demand)
      and ad-injection.

      biz will win out over net neutralization..
      privacy, copyright, and other issues already taken care of.
  • This sounds like a good idea, but I doubt nothing will happen. This is a private bill. I can see the whole NDP and Bloc voting for it. However, knowing the conservatives, they will not be happy about that bill, and will likely make it a confidence vote. And the liberals will fall flat once again.
    • For those Americans and others who read this and assume it actually means something. The NDP is a small party full of crackpots and prairie halfwits. Think the US green party added to the moveone.org loons gives you a fairly good idea of what will happen to anything they propose.
      Even if this was the greatest Idea in the world most people in other areas than Sask and a few cities in British Columbia will quit listening the second they hear that the NDP was the one that proposed it. This is the fate of most

      • You're confused: the party of crackpots and prairie halfwits is the Reform Party, which now forms the core of the misleadingly named Conservative Party. The NDP is indeed a minority party without much power in Parliament, but it is much more influential than you let on. It is the ruling party in Manitoba, where it has formed the government since 1999, and has formed the government of British Columbia, the Yukon, Saskatchewan, and Ontario. The NDP is currently the Official Opposition in British Columbia, Sa

  • The gas company sells me gas by the cubic meter. The water company sells me water by the cubic meter. So why not have the ISP's sell me throughput (up and down) by the bit. The more I use the more I pay for. (Yes I know there will be other delivery/infastructure charges same as for water and gas)

    • The gas company sells me gas by the cubic meter. The water company sells me water by the cubic meter. So why not have the ISP's sell me throughput by the cubit.
      Fixed that for ya.

  • Unfortunately, net neutrality is unrealistic (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Although I completely agree that ISPs are screwing nearly everyone, net neutrality is still unrealistic.

    It's better to think of your internet connection like a tolled highway. When you pay $X to get onto the tolled highway, and your car can go 120kmph, thinking that you should rightfully be able to drive at a constant 120kmph is unrealistic. If there's lots of traffic, it doesn't matter what you paid for, you've still got to wait. Yet people seem to accept this, and not accept when their internet connection
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • After spending 20 minutes really reading the post, and any +1 replies to it, I'm starting to wonder if I need to see a doctor about paranoia problem.

    That, or is this not the trying to throw another comfortable, familiar line around the rural 56k users in Canada?

    I work for a crown controllers Canadian ISP. There's not many of us. It's suprising to see exactly how many people in our province alone are still on 56k service. Be in 5000, 10,000, or more - it's still very very high for a single province. I'm

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