Canada Needs Some Net Neutrality Enforcement

Did you see the news about Bell deciding that it can filter and shape traffic even carried over “wholesale” pipes to ISPs?

Users of the Canadian family-run ISP Teksavvy (which we profiled last year) have started noticing that Bell Canada is throttling traffic before it reaches wholesale partners. According to Teksavvy CEO Rocky Gaudrault, Bell has implemented “load balancing” to “manage bandwidth demand” during peak congestion times — but apparently didn’t feel the need to inform partner ISPs or customers

Note that this isn’t the same thing as all the news about Rogers, Cogeco, and whoever else, capping and throttling end user traffic. This affects all customers of any downstream ISPs, including business/corporate customers who are paying for uncapped service or with specific SLAs.

The Ars Technica piece on this provides a little hope, with a discussion of how users can pressure the telcos, and mentions of the need to build a net neutrality lobby in Canada.

Hitting back at throttling 

Users are fighting back, though. Canadian law professor Michael Geist points to a Google map that Canadian users have been collaboratively using to comment on filtering. Here in the US, where Comcast is under FCC scrutiny for its own traffic-shaping practices, much has been made of the need for transparency. But until transparency truly arrives, the P2P video company Vuze is developing an open- source plug-in for Azureus that makes it easy to sniff out ISPs using Comcast’s “TCP reset packets” P2P blocking scheme. Vuze tells Ars that the plug-in “monitors network connections, and every 10 minutes, it measures the number of reset TCP connections, displaying the results to the user. If they then click the “share results” checkbox, their results go to Vuze’s central server that aggregates the results and compares them across ISPs.” Wikis have also been set up to track ISP traffic-shaping practices around the world.

Taken together, such measures show that consumers (and, increasingly, legitimate businesses like Vuze and even NBC Universal) at least have the tools to shine a light into some traffic-shaping’s darker corners. But what good is this sort of transparency without a truly competitive market? Bell Canada’s move, should it turn out to affect all wholesalers and resellers of Bell’s DSL service, could mean that many of the options consumers once had in the DSL market are suddenly subject to throttling, and on Bell’s terms.

That leaves lobbying action and government regulatory bodies, both of which are slow to achieve results, and are certainly places where telcos and cable operators deploy huge resources to prevent “bad” decisions from being made.

Damien Fox, one of the cofounders of Wireless Nomad mentioned above, tells Ars today that the situation is “unacceptable, and a symptom of Bell’s arrogance. It is blatant censorship of our users’ Internet connections, and Bell is not going to escape a fight on this one. Either they back down, or independent providers should go to the CRTC, or the Federal Court if need be, to get our Internet connections unblocked.”

All of this private industry backwardness happens at the same time that the CBC is moving forward. Over the last several years we’ve seen Radio adopt podcasting and some other advances, and Television (which was already doing some cool stuff with Zed) moving right into this century with bittorrent releases of episodes (OK, “episode“, and an episode of a crap reality show at that, but come on, it’s a baby step in the right direction.) So much for that conservative myth that private industry fosters innovation while the public sector stagnates.

I wonder if the CBC can sue Bell Canada for interfering with its content–isn’t Bell supposed to be a “common carrier”?

It’s probably time you read up on Net Neutrality in Canada, and signed some petitions.