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.'"
Stop overselling (Score:5, Insightful)
If you can't provide what you're being paid for, stop overselling the network you have.
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.
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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 te
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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.
I've been with Tekksavvy for a few years as well. Great ISP. But notice how they changed the pricing scheme? What was before unlimited had a bandwidth cap put on it. If you did want to go the unlimited route, you now had to pay more. Even though they were getting more customers.
I'm not going to deny that Rogers and Bell charge prices that don't seem all that competitive. What I am trying to do is explain their logic, and that of most ISPs.
Re:Stop overselling (Score:4, Insightful)
If you're selling a 50MB/s to 1,000 people at "5MB/s per person", you deserve anything bad that comes your way. I can see putting maybe up to 20 people on that 50MB/s on a supposed 5MB/s per person, but anything more than that is definitely asking for trouble. Even regular users are going to max their connections simultaneously during peak hours.
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You won't really see 50Mbps shared by anyone (except cable networks). More like 1000Mbps shared to hundreds or thousands of customers. You'd be surprised by how little bandwidth is actually used, except by students.
Re:Stop overselling (Score:5, Interesting)
Do I have a problem with other people using p2p? Not at all. But, if you want to use a shared resource and expect to hog the entire bandwidth available, I have no sympathy. Either 1) get used to lower bandwidth, or 2) pay the extra to get dedicated bandwidth. TANSTAAFL.
But none of these issues are related to net neutrality. I don't think anyone should have to pay a premium to ensure that their sites are given priority - or even equal - access to bandwidth. I'm disappointed that so many Canadian ISP's are willing to throw in the towel; it makes me sad.
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How come bandwidth doesn't split exactly equally between individuals using the network? How does it happen that a bittorrent user slows down all the other users, as opposed to the other users slowing him down until everyone has exactly the same bandwidth? That seems the most equitable solution. Is it technologically unfeasible? why?
Thanks for taking the time to educate an intern
Re:Stop overselling (Score:4, Interesting)
How come bandwidth doesn't split exactly equally between individuals using the network? How does it happen that a bittorrent user slows down all the other users, as opposed to the other users slowing him down until everyone has exactly the same bandwidth? That seems the most equitable solution. Is it technologically unfeasible? why?
I'm not 100% sure on this, but no doubt someone with more clue will chime in if I'm wrong.
I think if you leave things to run their own way, the distribution will be "equal" but weighted by connections, not users.
Now, web pages use one or a handful of connections at most (one for the text and a few others for images - sometimes), and online gaming uses just one from the player to the server, but bittorrent opens hundreds or even thousands of connections per user (one to each peer). Every connection would be given even priority, but in terms of users, the bittorrent user is getting a weight of thousands compared to a weight of 1 for users of other protocols.
There are technological ways to fight this and the most reasonable seems to be QoS shaping, i.e. the network being configured so: "If there is plenty of vacant bandwidth, your bittorrent connections can have it all. But if a more important protocol demands some bandwidth, your bittorrent packets will be put at the end of the queue and they will be served first".
You might even set this up on your home router if you use bittorrent a lot, and also game or use VOIP telephony - so that bittorrent can run at full speed while you're asleep but gets shoved aside if you make a VOIP call, so that you can have enough bandwidth for a good quality conversation. The technology is old and is even supported now in many consumer grade routers.
Many ISPs, including (from TFS) Rogers do exactly this. 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.
The strongest suggestion here on /. is that one thing they could do, is stop selling a service like "20MBps unlimited" which is not supportable by their network if more than a small fraction of users actually utilise the full advertised features of the product they paid for. Instead, they could offer a service marketed as "sometimes 20MBps not really unlimited, but close enough for web pages and email and gaming" for that price, and keep the bittorrenters well appraised that "because this service isn't unlimited, really, we'll shape your downloads into oblivion - if you don't want that pay the full price for a low contention business grade connection".
The problem as I see it (although I live in Australia and am removed from the broadband situation on the North American continent) is twofold: one, that services are advertised as unlimited and they really aren't (and cannot feasibly be), which leads to all these issues of how much shaping is legal, what disclosure is required, how much overselling, etc.
Two, is that the amount of bandwidth used by plain old ma and pa customers is going up compared to 10 years ago - without bittorrent, people are watching videos on youtube, streaming TV from hulu, doing video phone chats over the net, uploading gigs of photos and videos to picasa, etc - not just downloading web pages at a few kb of text each like they used to. But, the ISPs still have the same network they did then, and even more customers than they did then as broadband becomes more prevalent.
In Australia the first problem is more or less solved, with the ACCC having successfully lobbied government to make it illegal to advertise plans with any kind of limit as "unlimited". So, they are sold as "20gb per month" with peak and off peak times clearly marked. This wasn't always so [zdnet.com.au] in Australia - in fact there was even a baseball cap made with the writing "I signed up for an unlimited Internet account with Telstra but all
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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 doe
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I would go for throttleing (Score:3, Interesting)
If it were minute by minute throttling. for a given price the ISP and I decide on a number of Kb per minute. I get and send bytes in each minute until the limit is met, then my connection stops but only until the beginning of the next minute. At any time I can go to my ISP's Website and change my setting - paying more so I get a larger number of Kb per minute. Plans should start at $9.00 a month with a number of Kb equivalent to a fast dialup connection.
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You can use a round-robin scheduler to prioritize other traffic over p2p (in other words, let p2p soak up the bandwidth that remains after all the "normal" internet activities have taken their share). But there is a world of difference between that and what these companies apparently want to do: filter content selectively and block some protocols entirely.
I have no problems with assigning a lower-priority to p2p. I do have a serious problem with my ISP deciding what I can and cannot see and do.
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QoS shaping and network neutrality are 2 separate issues. However, it's convenient for ISP's to lump them together - and 90% of the people in politics nei
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The difference between an ISP and a University is that much of the traffic of a University stays on campus. That might not be true for the student personal traffic when they p2p their music, but the "official" traffic does. People on campus access servers on campus to move data on campus. Joe Engineering student connects to an on-campus server to run his programs and submit his term papers.
For example, all my data sits
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Stop overselling, or don't... (Score:2)
If you don't want to do that then change the pricing scheme!
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"Designed"? (Score:5, Insightful)
'P2P file sharing is designed to cause network congestion,' says the company.
Yes! Clearly, when designing a P2P protocol, my first concern was to make absolutely sure that your network would be congested, because I hate the Internet!
This isn't all about you, ISPs. It's about us, and what we want to use our bandwidth for. And yes, P2P filesharing does have design goals other than clogging your tubes.
Re:"Designed"? (Score:5, Insightful)
p2p was designed to cause congestion in the same way that cars were designed to cause traffic jams.
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p2p was designed to cause congestion in the same way that cars were designed to cause traffic jams.
Not quite.
P2P apps usually open large numbers of connections.
This is optimal from a P2P user's perspective.
It is not optimal from an ISP perspective.
It's the difference between Napster (1 to 1) and bittorrent (many to many).
The network degrades equally for everyone under Napster, but not so much under bittorrent.
At least that's my understanding of how things work.
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Core routers generally don't care much about connections, except for stuff like Lawful Interception. They look at each packet separately. You do get a bit of TCP unfairness by opening lots of connections, but it's reasonably easy for routers to counteract that.
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As others pointed out to you, you have no clue how routing works. Most routers past your home NAT box do not consider individual connections, merely individual packets. A new connection, as far as a router at an ISP is supposed to be concerned (unless it is spying on you for the cops or blocking contents for "your own good"), is just yet another packet to route, except this one has one bit different (the SYN flag) in its header. So as far as ISPs are concerned it makes absolutely no difference if you open
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Or better yet: (Score:3, Insightful)
p2p was designed to cause congestion in the same way that carpool* was designed to cause traffic jams.
* note. "carpool", not "carpool lanes"
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They will sell you a buggy, horse, 'driver', whip, inn room for the
night to swap horses, stables, straw and uniforms.
Along comes this 'car' thing. What to do?
Rogers is invested in the past. The have a royal logo too.
They know the past. The 'cars' do not need everything
Rogers has invested in. Just the inns.
What is Rogers to do? They can rent space in the Inns, and make
car users feel safe for the night, but they have to
keep the whole horse thing going
Re:"Designed"? (Score:5, Insightful)
And yes, P2P filesharing does have design goals other than clogging your tubes.
The way I see it, the portion I paid for is my tubes. And unlimited means unlimited.
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And yes, P2P filesharing does have design goals other than clogging your tubes.
The way I see it, the portion I paid for is my tubes. And unlimited means unlimited.
Indeed. If they received even one cent of public money towards building their infrastructure then net neutrality should be an absolute and uncompromised requirement. If they have a government-enforced monopoly like most (all?) telecoms, then net neutrality should be an absolute requirement.
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And yet, like others have said, controlling network traffic for quality of service (realtime apps vs non real time) reasons is not bad, and it would be silly to make that illegal.
But, try explaining to a politician IP QOS issues vs anticompetitive filtering (IE blocking Skype to promote expensive long distance phone services),
especially when high paid lobbyists are throwing cash around with their messages..
It's good that time limits you then... (Score:2)
And unlimited means unlimited.
Well, really since if time didn't put a limit to you traffic usage ISPs could argue that truly unlimited is a physical impossibility...
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Because I can certainly point out where in the contract they state that they reserve the right to cut off people for using too much.
Do they define "too much", or is it just a "when we feel like it" thing?
My point is, 1. you pay for a service, 2. there is a contract about said service. Now, if they don't make it clear when they cut you off, they shouldn't be allowed to. The contract also applies to them. If they say unlimited, it'd better be unlimited. If they say 300 Gb a month, they shouldn't be able to cut you off at 290.
There are those of us who depend on the internet for a living, and being cut off for no good reason and no way of k
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I get 100 mbit fiber for $65/mo in a small town in Iowa. WTF is taking the rest of you so long?
One word, comcast...
Re:"Designed"? (Score:5, Insightful)
HTTP wasn't designed to congest networks, but as it is unicast, if lots of people "tune in" online to watch the latest Presidential address, the networks get congested. Arguably, P2P would be better in this, and multicast streaming would be even better.
Should ISPs prioritize P2P above HTTP, and multicast above P2P?
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p2p congests less than HTTP because a good chunk of the traffic stays local
Howa bout having one super-leacher serving as lieutenant seeder to the network's other peers?
Heck, P2P could even SAVE the ISP money by sparing it from costly transit payments with its upstreams.
P2P may be cloggy, but as far as upstream bw goes, it gets a bigger bang for the byte.
People with handcuffs and shackles on (Score:5, Insightful)
are hard pressed to hurt others. Indeed, we are quite safe when everyone is controlled and limited. Sadly, Videotron is playing the typical "think of the children" and "trade freedom for safety" thing because they think it'll get them in good with the media companies.
Or something retarded like that.
Re:People with handcuffs and shackles on (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Unfortunately Canada's Gov't Loves big Corporation (Score:2, Insightful)
Our country is continuously littered with news of regulators supposedly established to help me 'the little guy' when in fact all they do is help keep monopolies and oligarchies from losing control. In fact the regulatory bodies up here continually vote in favour of screwing the little guy for the big corps.
CRTC Forces us folks to keep lazy and lousy TV content providers in business through fees even though I only watch the Asian/Indian/Far East/5 french channels only for the few minutes per week when my fe
"Benefit to society." (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:"Benefit to society." (Score:5, Insightful)
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Sure, and "Don't you know that no productive trade ever happened before property rights?"
Let's stop throwing these strawmen around. Yes, lots of works, intellectual or physical, are produced without regard for the property rights that would exist in them. It's just that when such rights are non-existent, the corresponding production is nowhere near what it could be, and people are poorer in terms of that resource.
No, I'm not defending copyright as it stands today, and I would agree if the GP was referring
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[snip "copyrights make content creation a viable business model"]
So where are the studies showing that this actually works in practice, that creative output as a whole has increased (quantity or quality) due to copyrights?
How did playwrights/composers make a living before copyright (especially given that there were people who could watch/listen to a performance and remember it well enough to duplicate it)?
How is it that some publishers make money selling copies of government reports (which are public domain)?
accusations (Score:5, Insightful)
notice how he used the word "accusations" instead of anything that would imply the necessity of evidence.
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notice how he used the word "accusations" instead of anything that would imply the necessity of evidence.
In older times, the role of punishing people due to accusations (without need for evidence) was carried out by the Inquisition. Nobody expects the Canuck Inquisition!
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How about we punish corporations on accusation?
For example, three paople call in that the RIAA is evading taxes. So the police comes and seizes all their assets because they were evading taxes.
Someone calls that the ISP proposing this is commiting fraud and false advertising because they do not deliver what they promise. So, they are heavily fined for doing this withou any evidence.
After several accusations, the corporation is forced to close and the CEO is sentenced to life without parole with confiscation
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And of course abusive "we do what we want" style EULA's mean you don't have recourse, as it's one of those "sole and final discretion" deals.
o, canada... (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
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I'd like to see Bell and Videotron being split into an ISP and Other business.
I'd like to see their senior executives split into a couple different pieces too.
Net neutrality (Score:5, Insightful)
Would you be upset if companies were allowed to contruct paying-subscriber-only lanes on the freeway? Or if they were able to just throw out traffic cones wherever they wanted?
It really is that fucking simple. There is no benefit from any deviation from net neutrality.
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Would you be upset if companies were allowed to contruct paying-subscriber-only lanes on the freeway? Or if they were able to just throw out traffic cones wherever they wanted?
It's potentially worse than that. It might be as bad as if trucking companies were allowed to own roads, and then permitted to charge competing trucking companies more than they charge their own trucks. Or charge you more to drive because they don't like the route you decided to take, or don't believe that they get financial benefit from the contents of your trunk.
I think the main problem (and I admit that I harp on this a lot) is that people think of the Internet as an entertainment service rather than
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.
Not the same (Score:3, Insightful)
Would you be upset if companies were allowed to contruct paying-subscriber-only lanes on the freeway?
No, I would not be upset by this because I would be paying for exactly what I got. What would upset me would be if I found I could not leave at the exit I wanted to because the local town had reached the maximum number of cars that day and refused to pay for a larger quota from the highway company despite the fact that they had built an exit easily capable of handling more.
I pay my ISP for access to the internet at a particular bandwidth. The company I connect to is also paying their ISP for a particula
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Mod insult up (Score:3, Funny)
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Yep, or VoIp,
Or game data traffic over torrent data.
My own cheesy home NAS router pretty much chokes if I torrent something, and no other IP services like web browsing, or real time network game data gets any real bandwidth, even if I set my torrent client to limit connections and speed.
(Yes, it's an artifact of a poor quality NAS router).
I would like to be able to set my router to de-prioritize torrents, but perhaps the guy next door would prefer it the other way..
The trouble is these ISP's use doublespeak
Videotron as everything to loose to P2P (Score:5, Insightful)
Videotron is not not just an ISP.
They are also a cable company, phone company
and they own stores where you can rent dvds
and games.
The are own by Quebecor, which is a publishing
company, which also owns TVA, a tv station,
and stores selling video games, and the list goes on and on.
Basically, they tend to be a monopole which
wants to make you pay for everything you watch and
play.
They are certainly not neutral about net neutrality.
and that makes Videotron a ..... (Score:5, Insightful)
Fantastic shining example of why we NEED network neutrality; to stop companies like this from having a monopoly on all entertainment and in doing so drag your business and information needs into the same quagmire of unregulated information highway robbery.
Time for an information age robin hood?
This sort of greed is disgusting.
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Fantastic shining example of why we NEED network neutrality; to stop companies like this from having a monopoly on all entertainment
I thought the whole point of copyright is to give the creater/owner a monopoly on their content.
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No.
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Time for an information age robin hood?
We have two: Justin Frankel and Bram Cohen. Of the two, I'd say Frankel more greatly resembles Robin Hood: he deliberately cut loose with Gnutella on the even of the AOL / Time Warner merger.
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YOu can bet your ass that TVA will not be reporting any news about this, or if they do, it'll be about how bad the evil p2p users are.
company regulation? (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh wait. I thought it was the government's job to regulate businesses. The latest economic crisis has pretty much shot businesses in the foot on that matter.
Last time I heard, they have 100 mbps in Japan and Korea, a great infrastructure, and no bottleneck issues. If Videotron, or any other western ISP, can't keep up with technology, maybe they just need to fail, and admit that our communication infrastructure isn't something to be entrusted to people out to make a buck.
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Hey Harper (Mr. Prime Minister), repeat after me: there is no need, at present, to break network neutrality. If congestion becomes an issue in the future, due to all bandwidth running through only two "pipes" (Bell & Videotron/Rogers), then maybe it's the c
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Funny thing about Videotron is they're on really really good terms with the government. I mean REALLY good.
A few years back Rogers made a bid to buy out Videotron, and the Québec government stepped in and blocked the deal. So you can't expect Videotron to be too concerned about violating regulations or laws, or anything to that effect.
"We own the pipes"? (Score:2, Informative)
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Can somebody enlighten me about what exactly these ISPs bought or licensed to use? I get confused by this whole issue of what it takes to become my own ISP. That is, removing these companies from the equation entirely.
If we own the "pipes" then why do I need an ISP?
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Odd that...
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".
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> 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.
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I say again: open pipe.
Open, fat pipe, which is, after all, the reason we all have broadband.
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Um...I would disagree. Net Neutrality should (and, I believe, is generally accepted to) mean that my provider cannot screw with my traffic because it suits their interests to do so. 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.
Rogers introduced monthly caps and started throttling just after they introduced their Rogers Home Phone product.
Congestion (Score:2)
Misdirection (Score:4, Interesting)
What blatant misdirection! There's a huge difference between blocking spam and viruses in order to protect customers against hassle and harm, and blocking access to content because it allows you to make a buck once the content producer begs you to please stop blocking their content. Protecting customers against spam and viruses is a service; blocking content because the content provider hasn't paid you off, on the other hand, is extortion. Net Neutrality is supposed to prevent just this kind of extortion.
Kicking users off the 'Net after several accusatio (Score:2, Insightful)
First of all last time I checked and looked at my stack of blank cdr's I paid for the right to legally download music all I want. Want it any other way best remove the levi and pay me back the money I paid into it for the pleasure of storing my own Photos and documents.
I'll sending Shaw off a nice letter today and a pre cancelation notice they can keep and use the day they decided to limit my rights and INTERNET connection.
Canadian Net Neutrality Coalition (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.saveournet.ca/ [saveournet.ca] for supporting net neutrality in Canada.
Tubes... (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe we should make the tubes owned by a public company that leases lines to ISPs rather than letting Rogers, Bell and all these other companies do it.
Re:Tubes... (Score:4, Funny)
Saskatchewan has Sasktel, which is a government owned utility, providing phone and internet to both retail and wholesale providers. I've never had better rates, service or polices with any other telco and I would be very surprised if they tried to pull any of these tactics. But we should probably privatize them and let the market work it out.
Bullshit is still bullshit... (Score:2)
It has to be understood that... (Score:2)
Canada, being a banana republic with snowploughs, has no stringent media ownership requirements, as the various liberal governments are in the pockets of media, and the rarer conservative governments are pro-business, so there is not real incentive to have laws geared towards protecting the people.
Québecor owns newspapers and a TV network, and it already discriminates agains
Godwin's Law for Networks (Score:2, Insightful)
Hello, the Internet. I would like to propose Godwin's Law for Networks: In any discussion on network policy, such as net neutrality, traffic shaping, quality of service, protocol-based filtering, etc., if you introduce a claim that involves child pornography, you lose the argument.
The child pornography community will use whatever technology is available for information transfer, just like the rest of us. Any policy short of inspection of every document that passes through the network and forbidding any op
Huh? (Score:2)
P2P file sharing is designed to cause network congestion
What does this mean? File sharing is designed to share files. Short-sighted ISP management, on the other hand, is guaranteed to cause network congestion.
Idiots. P2P is the killer app that has justified the expense of a high-speed connection for untold millions of people, and all they can think about is killing it.
I repeat. Idiots.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
An Open Reply (Score:3)
Second there will be an effort to integrate all transmissions around a custom standard... open wireless or mesh networks... your choice[note, you won't get money from the mesh].
Meanwhile, yes people are downloading more and that might interfere with legitimate services such as email and web access, do some routing... make T1s available for those who require them and see who bites.
VDSL is your friend, grow a pair and buy some from Korea.
Charge less... then you won't need so much security... coupled with this improve your damn tech support by giving them more power. They usually need to kick upstairs because they can't handle both billing and technical issues... hire techies pay them enough they know it's a stable career (with advancement into design and development) and give them the power to actually help people.
But I'm being silly, you already know all this and more about the problems associated with each of these issues... so go make lists of the problems and benefits, choose a solution and get to it.
Also... stay the fuck away from our liberties ( first amendment or Canadian Charter of Right and Freedoms equivalent) otherwise you're going to stunt history and even you twisted bastards aren't that [insult insulting term based on your assesment of this risk]
File sharing is dead - when will they learn? (Score:2)
Downloading audio files is a waste of time. It is much more efficient to bring your drive to a friend's house and copy it all en masse, and then weed it out as you go. Especially now that I and my buddies have all migrated to FLAC which sounds WAY better.
Same with movies. Any digital data.
file sharing was cool back when drive space was expensive and DSL/cable held a comparative advantage. That is no longer t
In the name of better society ... profit (Score:2)
1. In the name of better society
2. We need more power over our clients
3. Profit.
Always works!
Re:want the old slashdot back? (Score:5, Insightful)
But that's just the genertional gap just being shown.
Back in the old days, /. was a purists tech site. They had some funnies as in (groan), but mostly was discussion and Linux advocation. Then, we really didnt care about the legality of whatever. As long as it was technologically feasible and interesting, it was worth doing.
Fast forward past the Napster years....
We now live in a world of "Papers Please", and surveillance tech. Most of our cool ideas have been deemed "illegal", as they were gray first. The 2600 judgment said that just linking was violating. Now, most of our efforts are to try to turn this tide around, telling politicians how stupid their policies really are.
We now talk about network neutrality, but that's solved by encryption. Next they block encryption and we set it up to look like html over http "share servers". And then we have the 750-35000 dollar fine if we are found trading. Look at NewYorkCountryLawyer for those situations. He's a techie geek lawyer who fights on our side.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Sometimes I'm an idiot! I do sincerely apologize for these occasions, like just now.
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