Holy “ask and ye shall receive”, Batman!
From the CBC
The National Union of Public and General Employees, which represents more than 340,000 workers across the country, on Friday wrote to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission to investigate the practice of “traffic shaping” and its impact on internet users.
“These internet service providers are, with little or no public accountability, implementing measures that will discriminate against the use of legal software for legitimate uses. This is unacceptable,” wrote union president James Clancy. “The continued silence on these matters by the CRTC and the Canadian government violates the trust the Canadian people have placed in you.”
The union wants the CRTC to enact rules prohibiting ISPs from discriminating against certain uses of the internet, such as the file-sharing protocol BitTorrent, which is used by many to share large video files. Bell and Rogers have for some time been quietly shaping traffic, or slowing these uses by limiting how much speed they get.
and also:
NUPGE’s complaint also came a day after New Democrat MP Charlie Angus called on Industry Minister Jim Prentice to take action on keeping the internet neutral.
“Jim Prentice cannot turn a blind eye while the telecommunication companies decide which lanes of digital traffic will be deliberately filled with potholes,” he wrote on his website. “These actions have serious implications for Canada’s innovation agenda. Protecting net neutrality is a fundamental cornerstone in encouraging the development of a true knowledge economy.”
Angus told CBCNews.ca that consumers are being ripped off, innovation is being stifled and the service providers are making out like bandits while the government and CRTC stand idly by.
“We need to set some clear ground rules around how much power the telcos are going to have in rewiring the internet,” he said. “There are anti-competitive questions and also questions about consumers getting ripped off when they sign up for promises of maximum bandwidth and then that bandwidth gets throttled down.”
“This is the ultimate way of shutting down the innovation agenda in Canada… we can’t let these companies arbitrarily decide who has access and who doesn’t.”
I hope this keeps bubbling for a while, and isn’t just a news cycle blip.
