Net Neutrality is Dying in Canada

Recently the discussion around net neutrality has come up again with Google and Verizon coming to something of a preliminary non-binding agreement on what they'd like to see in legislation. Basically wired internet would "remain" neutral, while wireless internet would be open for ISPs to distort and twist as they please in order to suck more money out of the consumer. The reason I put "remain" in fake quotes and why I see this all as rather quaint is that in Canada net neutrality is already dying.

Bittorrent is already throttled on most major ISPs, with some work arounds available through the likes of Teksavvy or other third parties. But beyond that a much more insidious form of discrimination is taking place. Instead of throttling stuff they don't like, the ISPs have started giving preferential treatment to the stuff they do.

Take Rogers for example. Many of their wireless plans now offer unlimited access to social networks while still capping your usage on the rest of the internet. At first you might think this is great, many people use little else aside from Facebook and Twitter. They have also allowed unlimited use of their crappy online TV service, while lowering the caps on all other traffic to squeeze Zip's online TV service out of the picture.

This is potentially a very bad precedent as they are basically creating a Whitelist for the entire internet, a list of approved sites. Taken another step, Rogers could widen the number of approved sites, while simultaneously decreasing the bandwidth available for the rest of the net.  (And I'm sure that these sites don't get to be on the approved list for free, they probably have to pay for that privilege.) 

Over time this will create a cable TV model of the internet where only certain sites are available in the standard package, and you get very limited bandwidth for anything else. You can be sure that the sketchy sites you use to stream free TV will not be on the approved list, same goes for anything else that competes with Rogers business model or anything that is morally dubious like pornography. 

The worst part about this is that it is much more difficult to circumvent. I can get around Blacklists (like bittorrent throttling) by encrypting my traffic. If they can't see what I'm doing, they can't tell I'm doing anything they don't like. But in the Whitelist model the situation is reversed. If I'm only given 500MB a month for anything that isn't Facebook or Twitter I can't easily get around that. I'd have to somehow route traffic through Facebook or Twitter in order to get around the limits, and there is little chance those sites would allow that.

I don't know about you, but I don't want Rogers telling me which parts of the internet I can use. This isn't fear-mongering or FUD, this is happening right now. What we need is a real net neutrality law that prohibits positive or negative discrimination of certain sites or protocols beyond basic network management. Think of it as a Charter of Rights and Freedoms for the internet. 

Without such legislation, our only hope is that technology continues to evolve faster than Rogers can adapt so that work-arounds will always be available. But frankly I'd rather rely on a true Net Neutrality than on Moore's Law.

Comments

[Emma]

While I absolutely agree with everything written here, why are you only talking Rogers? Isn't Bell and Telus doing the exact same thing? Shouldn't you share the blame?

Secondly, I thought Netflix was coming with streaming movies - not Zip. As far as I know, Zip isn't doing anything new.

But good post. I share your sentiments.

[Captain Crunch]

From what I heard Telus was leading the charge in making a per page subscription service; like with cable channels. The future of free information and community will be killed by this future.

We as a people will have a hard time preventing this as we are not represented correctly in our parliament anyways. We first need a political system which truly represents the population i.e the percentage of votes a party gets equals the percentage of seats in the house of commons. Also for large enough issues like this a vote should be put to the public; and yes this is definitely worth all the costs as the internet is a huge medium for small, medium and large business to compete in and Canada's reliance on small business is massive.

REMEMBER: You vote with your wallet every time you make a purchase. Therefore always choose the company with whom you agree with their policies. Unfortunately Bell, Telus and Rogers hold the oligopoly in Ontario for Internet. Even smaller providers have to buy their access from the three. If things are different in the other provinces then do not support the companies whom are dismantling net neutrality. Stand up for your right to surf freely.