CRTC Issues Net Neutrality Rules 184
An anonymous reader writes "The CRTC today introduced a new framework to guide Internet service providers in their use of Internet traffic management practices. ISPs will be required to inform retail customers at least 30 days, and wholesale customers at least 60 days, before an Internet traffic management practice takes effect. At that time, ISPs will need to describe how the practice will affect their customers' service. The Commission encourages ISPs to make investments to increase network capacity as much as possible. However, the Commission realizes that ISPs may need other measures to manage the traffic on their networks at certain times. Technical means to manage traffic, such as traffic shaping, should only be employed as a last resort."
As someone living in Canada.. (Score:5, Insightful)
.. and I know this will get -1 troll.. but I have to say it...
fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck..
and of course.. FUCK!!
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.. and I know this will get -1 troll.. but I have to say it...
fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck..
and of course.. FUCK!!
But how do you really feel.
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.. and I know this will get -1 troll.. but I have to say it...
fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck..
and of course.. FUCK!!
But how do you really feel.
I suspect they may be holding something back... possibly some repressed displeasure...
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.. and I know this will get -1 troll.. but I have to say it... fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.. and of course.. FUCK!! But how do you really feel. I suspect they may be holding something back... possibly some repressed displeasure...
Help! Help! He's being repressed!
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But how do you really feel.
I really feel you should have ended that sentence with a question mark.
Re:As someone living in Canada.. (Score:5, Interesting)
the CRTC really proved who has the pants in the family.
effectively, the ruling says "all we have to do (as ISP's; and let's not forget there are really only 3 flavours here) is provide notice that we are doing...everything we are already doing, and can now do it in a more legitimized way. thanks CRTC, the cheque is in the mail."
this really doesn't bode well for any new competition in any communications arena, including cell phone services, as the only players are the one's mentioned above.
for anyone mentioning that 'they own the pipes, let them do what they want". the canadian taxpayer subsidized the development of the networks involved, they were not privately funded. at the same time, money provided via a service charges on all bills was to go into a further system upgrade. the money seems to have never made it, and the companies continued to charge the fee and pocket the money the entire time AFTER the goverment had told them to stop it. it finally took a supreme court decision (yep, they fought it the entire way) to force them to spend the money on more than just fresh decorating the their offices.
Re:As someone living in Canada.. (Score:5, Informative)
I am surprised that no coverage on slashdot for this:
http://dissolvethecrtc.ca/ Details is on the site.
This is a online petition for Canadian who are dissatisfied with our CRTC. Currently there are 8495 signatures and need another 1505 to go before this petition is submitted to the minster in charge of the CRTC.
Contrary to the name, this petition is aimed at getting a new CRTC from people that cars about Canadians. It is not about removing it let things go to hell as it is already.
>The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) was created for the purpose of ensuring broadcasting and telecommunications systems serve the Canadian public and ensure that Canadians have a wide variety of options to create and view works of media or communicate across the country and the entire world.
>We, the undersigned, believe that the CRTC has become a burden on the Canadian public and are failing to perform their duties in the interest of the Canadian public and that of a fair and unbiased telecom policy.
Uhm, no (Score:5, Informative)
ISPs don't get to throttle at a whim. They can throttle, but if they do, they have to demonstrate to the CRTC that the throttling is as narrow as possible to solve the problem and, importantly, economic measures like tiers, or building capacity would not solve the problem. They're also not allowed to throttle any protocol so hard as to effectively block it, or throttle things like VOIP without advanced, explicit permission for the CRTC.
That's a big improvement over the status quo at the moment, which has allowed the ISPs to throttle for years with no oversight for any reason they felt like.
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From Telecom Regulatory Policy CRTC 2009-657: (emphasis mine)
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P2P (Legal or otherwise) are not a network security thread. So when they talk about network security they most likely talk about (d)dos attacks such as sym flood and similary attacks.
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Right now I have a 24MBit uncapped and unthrottled ASDL2+ connection for $39/month with a Bell reseller (colba.net). Yesterday I got a letter from my ISP telling me that under the new rules set by Bell, I was only really allowed to have 5-10GB a month, but that they would be so kind as to permit me to have 60GB a month at my current monthly
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It shouldn't up to the ISPs to decide what is and/or to take care of DDoS attacks or spam bots.
When I was on Rogers, my server would send me email updates quite frequently, and suddenly it stopped working, because Rogers assumed my server and any other residential computer that was sending out emails was sending spam.
In fact, sendmail doesn't work at all if you are on a Rogers residential network, and that's just wrong. I should be able to send email from my machine without using someone else's SMTP server.
Re:As someone living in Canada.. (Score:5, Insightful)
the Canadian taxpayer subsidized the development of the networks involved, they were not privately funded
Same here in the USA. Since the 1990s, it has been estimated that the Telcos (& Cable Companies) have received in excess of $200 Billion dollars, specifically for laying Fiber to yours and my home. None of which was done. The telcos made promises, in order to receive money + additional taxes on bills + additional fees on bills (many of which, if not all fees & taxes are still being collected) that they would put fiber to our homes.
Worth repeating, The telcos received American tax revenue to put fiber to our homes and apartments. They have been receiving this money since the 1990s. They still receive money today.
Where's the Fiber? (Think 80s Wendy's commercial, Where's the Beef? and you have the right idea)
In addition, they spend in excess of $1.8 million per week to lobby our elected officials against net neutrality, to prevent being forced to run fiber to our homes, to prevent losing their monopoly/oligopoly tiered pricing system, to prevent being forced to provide enough upstream bandwidth so that Americans can watch IP TV, Videos and "rich" content via the Internet. All because they want to force to you pay for content via their Cable system ONLY.
This has been going on for over 20+ years.
The telcos were asked to provide fiber to homes in Wilson N.C., but refused. Based on their refusal the local politicians decided to get fiber for their community and invited Greenlight into the community. Greenlight put fiber to people's homes and charged $100 per month for 100Mbps / 100Mbps (synchronous, not throttled) service to their customers.
The Cable Company / telco response was to lobby the state legislature in North Carolina in order to prevent Greenlight from doing business and to prevent other communities from providing decent fiber service to themselves. The public record is there for all to see. It started last session and will continue next session. Citizens of North Carolina, do something before its too late, let your politicians know that they need to force open the market and invite businesses in to put fiber all the way to people's homes. Nothing less is acceptable.
It's been 20+ years if American providers wanted you to have fiber you would have had it by now. Stop defending the FUD and them. They do not deserve anything but your contempt.
FIOS charges $119 for 50MB/5MB. At least its Fiber.
In Japan, they have had 100Mbps/100Mbps for less than $55 per month as of 2000, thanks to government deregulation of NTT and fiber to homes. (Americans would have had this had the telcos been prevented from watering down and making un enforceable, The "Telecommunications Act of 1996". The telcos lobbyists were very effective. One can only imagine the parties held at Cable Company / Telco boardrooms all across the country at putting one over on American citizens.)
In Japan, by 2006, those same consumers were getting 1 Gbps / 1 Gbps (again synchronous service, not throttled or shaped) for less than $52 per month. Unlike in America where politicians (primarily Republicans) keep touting Market competition, it actually exists in Japan, not here in America. In America corporate monopolies and oligopolies prevent competition.
If the market would or could work, it would have. Face facts Americans, the market is NOT working. We have a 20 year proof and history. Other markets that are not working are obvious as well...wake up Americans, its already too late!
One might ask how the Japanese could give more bandwidth to consumers while lowering prices at the same time.
Very good question as here in America, the telcos/cable companies try to lie and tell Americans that bandwidth is scarce. It is not. This is a lie, it is FUD. Just look at the conversations they have with investors to get the truth of the
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Re:Subsidies for ip networks in Canada (Score:2, Insightful)
"the canadian taxpayer subsidized the development of the networks"
OK... I see this statement now and then but never with any support. Does anyone have a specific reference for direct subsidies to BELL, Shaw, Rogers, TELUS, etc from govts to build their IP networks?
The POTS/TDM side was rooted in the natural monopoly system which saw large revenues from long distance get fed back into building of infrastructure. We also, at one time, had government ownership in the public communications arena but that is
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Also, its Policy and NOT Legislation (Score:2, Insightful)
Nothing in this policy limits network providers from managing their networks in any manner they deem fit. If anything, it could work to prevent complaints. The complaint against Bell about P2P traffic management in a wholesale service fell through when it was determined that Bell had taken appropriate action and had not violated any rules. If Bell had published the ITMP, the complaint would likely have been killed sooner with less publicity.
Also, this is policy and not legislation. In Canada, government
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the canadian taxpayer subsidized the development of the networks involved
Can anyone provide a source for this. I said it in a previous thread and someone called me on it. The two of us couldn't find any real evidence that this is the case. Bell was a government sanctioned monopoly with complex ties to the (publicly funded) railways throughout it's history; but no direct subsidies. I think Rogers may have purchased some formerly public infrastructure but, so far as I can tell, it purchased it with straight
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It's bull. You can't find any confirming evidence because ... wait for it ... there is none.
There was some public money to provide internet connectivity to schools and libraries in Canada*, but it wasn't paid to the telecos or cable operators.
There has never been any taxpayer cash paid to ISPs or Telecos, aside from the fact that, like everywhere else, they enjoy a kind of utility monopoly provided they follow some rules, on
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"It's bull. You can't find any confirming evidence because ... wait for it ... there is none."
Telus was formed out of a merge between BC Tel and Alberta Government Telephones (AGT). Both Crown corporations that went 'public'.
Rogers became through CNCP telecommunications, another Crown Corp that used to be part of CN rail and CP rail.
That's just off the tip of my 'tongue'. Remember kids, just because you can't find it in Google; doesn't mean it didn't happen!
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I only researched Bell myself and, as I mentioned a post ago, I found that it was a government supported monopoly but not subsidized. Rogers purchased CNCP's infrastructure but did it with private money, so it's a stretch to say it's taxpayer money. You're right about Telus, it's privatized public infrastructure. (I always forget about Telus, probably repressed memories due to hours and hours spent on the phone trying to find out why they arbitrarily disconnected my internet).
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" ... Rogers purchased CNCP's infrastructure but did it with private money, so it's a stretch to say it's taxpayer money. ..."
And it's quite a stretch to include CNCP in this at all; although CN was a public company for a while, it was formed from a series of bankrupt private railways, and then eventually returned to the private sector.
CNCP was a joint venture between CN Rail and CP Rail (which is, and always has been, a private company) to amalgamate their telegraph business ... you know, Morse Code. Teleg
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What does forming a company and selling it to private investors who, unless they are idiots, value it for what it is, have to do with subsidies?
Subsidies are collected from the public and paid to the private. If you are a Crown, you are not a private company, anymore than NASA is a private company.
But, if after a firm becomes privately owned, whether closely held or trading on a public stock market, you then give it cash collected from the taxpayer, that's a subsidy.
All of your examples, by the way, were pr
Re:As someone living in Canada.. (Score:5, Insightful)
You bitch, but its better than what you have now. Right now they don't have to even tell you.
This doesn't seem to preclude having a different law requiring it to be fair. This is just to make sure it is disclosed to you.
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You bitch, but its better than what you have now. Right now they don't have to even tell you.
Frankly, I must say I don't quite understand what happened in the network neutrality debate. IIRC, it began several years ago when some US ISP's wanted to blackmail content providers or just companies that could afford to be blackmailed by threatening to throttle their own customers access to specific sites (like Google) unless they paid.
That should have resulted in a quick and simple 'no-no' against discriminating
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Well you put it best. (Score:4, Informative)
I've been following this and there's really no difference to what telco/cablecos are doing right now. It's all spin factor you see:
"We're adding* protective measures* to ensure your regular* internet use* remains at high level of quality you've come to expect from Bellusawtron."
* at at additional $1.99/mo to your bill
* that prevent legitimate technology use that might be used for criminal/copyright infringrment purposes... like your computer
* Checking your @Bellusawtron.com email and browsing the telco/cableco news potal
* Which is 3-4 times per week for less than 30 minutes per session
Simply put, nothing's changed. Companies are now required to provide the spin letters they've been doing for years. Service is being fundamentally limited, but in a way that a majority of users won't understand relates to the message sent.
The funny/sad part is the fiber market has both improved and dropped in price tremendously with competition where I'm from, but just you try getting above a 1mbit connection to your home, or even a 1mbit who's QoS doesn't go to crap when you hit 60% usage.
-Matt
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I trust you already contacted the CRTC and representatives in your area? Maybe made donations or volunteered for parties that oppose this? Perhaps started creating ways to convince the general population this is a bad idea?
Or did you just post 37 expletives and forget about it?
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I'm unsure exactly what part you are so upset about?
The main thing I`m worried about is charge by usage.. which for the right amount of money and lobbying is a perfectly reasonable solution to network congestion.
I also don't see in any way how you were modded as insightful.
.. Totally agree.. for those keeping score at home:
50% Insightful
20% Informative
20% Overrated
Spineless CRTC (Score:2, Interesting)
And of course the big ISPs get what they want, all they have to do is tell us first. How is this net neutrality?
Name reflects subject not position (Score:4, Funny)
The same way the Sedition Act wasn't supporting sedition;(
And innovation takes another giant leap backwards.
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If it weren't for oligopoly, publication of their rules would become a bargaining point that would allow us to shop around.
Useless (Score:5, Insightful)
ISPs will be required to inform retail customers at least 30 days, and wholesale customers at least 60 days, before an Internet traffic management practice takes effect.
Most locales have de facto ISP monopolies. This ruling will just give customers 30 days warning of a rape, with no practical way to avoid it. Arguably better in theory, but no different in practice.
Re:Useless (Score:5, Insightful)
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my internet is netscape where do i get world wide web
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"world wide web" isn't synonymous with "internet"
my internet is netscape where do i get world wide web
how do i shot web?
The sad thing is, the last person I know who said something like that said it literal years ago. These days it's all "my internet is the blue e where do i get world wide web" or worse, "my facebook is the blue e where do i get internet"
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Honestly? I don't know the difference between WWW and the internet. I could guess, and I'd probably get close to correct, but how does it affect my every day browsing? I sure know what traffic shaping is though.
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The World Wide Web [wikipedia.org] is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. With a web browser, one can view Web pages that may contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia and navigate between them using hyperlinks.
Re:Useless (Score:5, Funny)
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Wait hang on. ISPs are demolishing houses to lay down cables now?
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At least it opens a debate.
A few months ago it was really unclear that the CRTC would ever lean ever so slightly in the direction of the consumer, all indicated the contrary. A previous preliminary ruling for Bell traffic shaping of its wholesalers gave almost all authority in the hands of Bell. I'm amongst what is I'm sure a lot of fellow Canadian slashdotters that petitioned against it.
Also remember that the CRTC is an old organization that is not very adapted nor flexible enough to take a real stand in
The Fix is In (Score:4, Informative)
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no, it just that the same poeple that own the 3 major ISPs in Canada happen to also control TV, radio and newspapers.
Last resort (Score:5, Insightful)
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Shaping vs Crippling (Score:5, Interesting)
So ISPs can't slow down time-sensitive traffic without prior approval by the CRTC, but there's no restrictions on slowing down other kinds of traffi, perhaps even to the point where the link is useless without being completely blocked? That's exactly the reason why I fear traffic shaping. Far too often it's used as a way to cripple people's connections rather than provide clients with true "quality of service".
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I don't have a list of ISPs, but I've read several posts by ISP employees (on a public forum that caters to ISPs) discussing and even bragging about crippling P2P applications and doing so in a way that leads users to believe the problem is with the peer's connection rather than the client's connection.
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ISPs that cripple torrents and sometimes how.
How is warning given? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Well, at least its not locked, and in a disused lavatory in the basement where the lights and stairs have gone.
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You can forward shaw.ca e-mail addresses to your personal email elsewhere.
Thank you, CRTC (Score:5, Insightful)
Amazing.. (Score:3, Interesting)
The US and Canada are so far behind in internet infrastructure it's pathetic. I forget the report I read recently but it said somthing like it would take 10 years or more for us to upgrade our infrastructure to even come close to Malaysia, South Korea, and Japan.
Many of these ISP's were subsidized by the government (at least in the USA) in agreement that they would upgrade their infrastructure so we could be on par with the rest of the world technologically. Many of our tax dollars paid for this 'upgrade' but in the end we got nothing. It is one of the biggest overlooked schemes ever.
The idea that traffic shaping should even be considered is total crap. North America should already have the infrastructure to handle the traffic at speeds far beyond what we're used to. I smell another 20 years of slow very incrimental speed increases all while we are sucked dry $49.00 a month for "High speed internet!! 50 times faster than dialup!!!!! Can't you believe that?? 50 times faster than DIALUP!"
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The problem is that it would appear that other companies did not build a neighborhood node structure. This put them years behind the US in delivering the Internet but once they did it was a lot faster. Problem in the US is we have 1000 homes hung off a single neighborhood node which is supplied by a fiber connection to the head end. This pretty much is how both DSL and cable work.
So you can give the homes "up to 20Mbit" access because the fiber link was upgraded from 256Mbit to (maybe) 2Gb. We are proba
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London, ON to Quebec, QC corridor: roughly 200 people per square mile, half the country's population.
Most of the population in the West is on the southern border, also in dense zones.
First use noted: Geist sites unreachable! (Score:4, Funny)
Can't reach _any_ Michael Geist sites (from either my cable and DSL conns). Coincidence? I think not!!!
Shaping traffic might be necessary... (Score:4, Interesting)
But ISPs should be required to validate the shaping. ISPs should be required to provide a web interface to allow users to see if shaping took place. The amount of shaping, what traffic was shaped, and why it was required should also be provided upon request. And overall statistics should be posted to ensure that the ISPs do not rely on shaping as a replacement for infrastructure investment (typically funded by the government).
Without this information there is no way to keep the ISPs honest. So require that is is available. And the legal right for an ISP to shape traffic should be preserved just in case it is occasionally required.
As is stands, this is not required. Net neutrality just died in Canada.
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Network neutrality has been dead everywhere ever since Big Content bribed its way into the inner circle.
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How is traffic-shaping necessary? Oh, right... it's necessary when you have a bunch of customers you're selling 3Mbps DSL circuits to who are very nearly saturating your backbone architecture and maxing out your peering agreements THEN you decide to "upgrade" your customers to 4Mbps service. You do that to "compete" with those other guys on cable who have just raised their advertised service rates. Of course, you don't actually upgrade your back-end... that's expensive. You just adjust a port rate limit
Why does the army care? (Score:2, Insightful)
Really, why would the U.S. Army's Cold Regions Test Center [army.mil] give a rat's ass about net neutrality?
(aka: Watch when you use acronyms. U.S.-centric acronyms are one thing, /. readers are used to it, but non-U.S. acronyms will be completely mis-construed by a vast majority of /.ers.)
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You're the first to do it, and bringing up an obscure sub department of Army R&D is very very stretching it.
No big pipe protection? (Score:2)
services must also be applied to wholesale services provided to secondary ISPs."
Why could they not move to protect the ISP's who buy pipe space, best effort or dedicated bandwidth.
So the Canadian gov can protect real bandwidth to paying customers ie other smaller regional or national ISP's.
What a smaller regional ISP does with a pipe is of no real interest to a telco, the pipe i
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ouch
Thanks for nothing CRTC... (Score:5, Insightful)
The ruling is a big fat nothing. No seriously CRTC, could you have made any ruling that said less than this one? "Do what you want, but we reserve the right to not like it. Just give your customers warning so that they can also not like it and not do anything about it."
At least they could have said, "we don't give a flying fuck about net neutrality one way or the other so we're not going to regulate," but they didn't. They simply tried to come as close as possible to not actually making a decision. Even if you choose wrong at least have the balls to decide something.
What everyone overlooks ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Slashdotters see a "Net Neutrality" debate, which is a borrowed phrase that encompasses a lot more than "can an ISP use packet analysis to throttle BitTorrent", which is what Bell, Rogers, etc, customers see this as.
What this ruling is about, however, goes back to how smaller ISPs were created in the first place in Canada. Basically, the CRTC said, about 20 years ago, something that might be summed up as:
Because you (the Telecos) enjoy a Utility status you have to, at the same price it costs you to transmit data across your lines, sell connectivity to smaller ISPs across those same lines, and do so in a manner that doesn't discriminate against them to your competitive advantage.
You can't offer your own customers access to a pipe that you don't also offer these independents.
You cannot say no to an ISP who wants to set up shop and needs what is on your poles and cables.
We are making you do this because we made it easy for you to build those poles across public and private land a long time ago, so there is a public interest in that infrastructure.
We do this because we think competition amongst a large number of providers is better than handing you the whole shebang to screw with like you did the phone system for about a hundred years.
Come around 2007 or so, and these independent ISPs complain that the telecos are throttling the lines they sell to these independent ISPs by the use of packet sniffing technology hunting for P2P data, and they go to the CRTC, who sets these rules, and complain that the telecos are not living up to the bargain outlined above. What they wanted was for the CRTC to say the teleco can do whatever it wants to their own customers, but the pipe to the indy ISPs must be as fat and unencumbered as ever.
The telecos respond saying "we have to, or our network will be overwhelmed".
The indy ISPs did not get what they wanted ... a ban on traffic shaping of any kind.
They did, however get what they were promised a few decades ago (see above). A lot of the noise over this last ruling comes from people who have accounts with ISPs and wanted a ruling saying "you can't throttle my BitTorrent traffic".
The fundamental issue, however, was addressed: This ruling says telecos cannot throttle anything they sell to these indy ISPs that they don't throttle to their own customers. They leave it up to the telecos to manage their network, but let it be known they won't tolerate the telecos doing something to the indy ISPs unless they also do it to themselves in exactly the same way and under exactly the same circumstances.
Fuck I hope I didn't throw out my dial up modem. (Score:2)
I may need it for the speed
Re:Ownership (Score:5, Insightful)
"Their pipes" were built with government money.
As someone who pays taxes.. I expect the people who run the network I paid for to do so in a way that best serves me..
Re:Ownership -- not always (Score:3, Interesting)
Everything is just fine most of the time. The condo's are fed with large pipes. Some of the condo's that this ISP services have pure Ethernet switches with no rate limiting per port. It only takes one person will fire up their P2P program and suck up all the bandwidth to the building. No biggie I say. I don't really care until latency states taking a hit. The ISP
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Your argument might carry weight if you weren't AC and provided more then generic terms. For all I know your talking about your condo in Italy or Brazil.
Considering your talking about a small ISP that owns their own pipe's I'd wager your very much NOT in Canada.
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We already have a mechanism for that.
It's called RFC 795.
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc795 [ietf.org]
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"Their pipes" were built with government money. As someone who pays taxes.. I expect the people who run the network I paid for to do so in a way that best serves me..
I hate that sense of entitlement attitude. Me me me and fuck everyone else.
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Me and everyone who's _not_ the telecommunication industry
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I'm not in telecommunications, and I don't share your attitude thank you very much.
Its a competition, not a government entity. The CRTC ruling doesn't change anything except make public the rules. If it's public, people will choose the supplier with more favourable rules, so eventually the free market will change things.
Re:Ownership (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Ownership (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, just like the railroads in the 19th century that were paid for by the government. There's a reason we called the people who then refused to give any money back to the government or listen to government legislation about the railroads "robber barons." Fun fact: When this was going on, one of the strongest opponents of the robber barons was Ambrose Bierce whom you may know as the writer of an "An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge" and "The Devil's Dictionary." If he were alive today he would likely be railing against this sort of poor treatment of net neutrality.
I am not fond of putting it this way, but it happens to be the truth. The robber-barons were successful for one reason and one reason alone: the government and the citizens didn't have the balls to do whatever it took to hold them accountable. They caved and they kow-towed. So the robber-barons were enriched, no one liked it, and no one did a damned thing about it.
Had the government instead revoked their corporate charters and sold all their assets at public auction for failure to comply with the legislation, we would all be telling a very different story. Even more so, if this had been accompanied by a widespread boycott of all rail services, with the intention not of reforming them, but of driving them into bankruptcy. I am not fond of it and I don't like it, but every now and then a message along the lines of "don't fuck with us" needs to be delivered. This seems perfectly acceptable when corporations take minors to court over copyright. I see no reason why the citizens should hold back and refuse to take every lawful action available to them to keep the corporations in check.
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I could not agree more.
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During that era, the government officials who might have put a stop to the railroad robber barons all had several thousand reasons (mostly with Benjamin Franklin on the front) for not doing so. Where do you think the term "railroading" in reference to legislation came from?
It wasn't even subtle: it was along the lines of railroad executives coming into Washington with suitcases of cash and each congresscritter stopping by and leaving with filled pockets.
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They can, if they don't want the benefits associated with being a carrier, and they'll have to make it clear they aren't an 'ISP' or something like that so people are not confused by it.
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In return for the privileges that corporations receive (and for the inherent power they gain over individuals), some price has to be paid. Regulating commerce is exactly one of the things we the people (in an enlightened liberal state) specifically empower government to do.
This would hold even if the pipes were not subsidized with public money.
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Their pipes, at least the expensive last-mile ones, generally run over (or, rather, under) ground that is owned by the people and controlled by the government on their behalf, for example streets. They were permitted to lay these pipes to provide certain services because the government, on behalf of the people, felt that it was advantageous for them to do so. They are allowed to exist as a corporation which exists because the government, acting on behalf of the people, awarded them a corporate charter, wh
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MTS is not bad, but you have to live in Manitoba. We live in a small town about 30km from Winnipeg and we get 8/1 DSL. In the city it's a bit better upload, but it sure beats dial-up or satellite, because there's really nothing else out here (aside from a couple fixed wireless providers). Luckily they don't seem to give a shit what you download or how much. This month I've burned through 56gb downloading about 30-40 torrents. They seem to be acting like a "dumb pipe" which is great for me. No caps, no throt
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Videotron?
Okay, I'm kidding. I keep hearing about a nice local ISP in Toronto, forgot their name. I know Montreal and Southern Quebec has CoopTel which isn't too predatory.
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Teksavvy is the name.
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AFAIK their DSL traffic is routed over Bell's infrastructure...just like virtually all third-party providers.
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Yes, just to get from the customer to their own connexions to the internet. And real tech support staffed with knowledgeable an helpful people that do care.
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*shrugs* I'd wish it was, they're basically in the media monopolists' camp.
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You're welcome. Unfortunately... a crtc decision will soon doom these companies. Go here to complain: http://www.consumersforinternetcompetition.com/ [consumersf...tition.com]
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Did this happen because I voted Conservative? Or, put another way, would this have happened if the Liberals were in power?
The liberals stated [liberal.ca] their support of net neutrality earlier in the year.
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both parties are garbage. You have to take the garbage out now and then or it really starts to stink. The liberals got too smelly.
It shouldn't matter what party is in power when the CRTC makes decisions? I suppose the CBC should also be neutral instead of having a liberal slant as well.
I haven't read the ruling but it sounds like it is all you can expect. Some traffic *is* more important than other traffic and some people pay a premium for faster/lower latency connections.
At least the telcos aren't allo
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i didn't read the ruling, and apparently neither did you, but from a post above it says you can block DDOS attacks and take measures in the event of outages or other 'network security'/malware etc events
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Problem is, this is an unattractive pricing model. If the Cable Co. implements this people will flock to DSL Company which doesn't implement this. Currently, supplying Internet connections to homes is all about market share - either you have enough density to support the company or you do not. Density is everything because there is a huge fixed cost to supplying a "neighborhood". Every user you get in the neighborhood can be added at almost zero additional cost - whereas adding a neighborhood costs mill
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Problem is, this is an unattractive pricing model
Unattractive for whom? I would love to have this model, as long as the price was reasonable (even 60 cents per GB would be an improvement to what I have now). The trouble is that ISPs love to give you a fixed amount of transfer and fine you if you go over. Use more than our 20GB/month plan, well then you have to buy our 60GB/per month plan to download 22GB this month. Same thing with cell phones rates.
It's almost on par with a scam as far as I'm concerned.