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.

Lobbyists beat Democracy and Reason on Copyright

by danaoshiroMichael Giest's sources say the prime minister’s office has decided to ignore the copyright consultations and huge evidence that Canada is not piracy haven, and essentially resubmit bill C-61, a piece of legislation even more restrictive on Canadians rights than the DMCA. It seems lobbyists can cancel out democracy and reason in Canadian politics.

The government asked for Canadians opinions on copyright law in 2009 and received a stronger, larger, and more unequivocal response than almost any public consultation in recent history. Conservative MP Cheryl Gallant called it "unprecedented" and Industry Canada claimed it was a "tremendous success". But apparently the opinion of the public, interest groups, and rights holders don't make a difference because the government is choosing to ignore the consultation.

To show just how much Canadians and Canadian businesses are against this, the final tally was 6138 submissions against C-61, and 54 in support. That isn't even a debate, that's a blowout. I can't think of any other policy question you could ask the public and get 99.13% of respondents on one side of the issue. You could get a larger portion of the population to agree to raising taxes by 10% than you could to agree to C-61.

Add to that the reality that Canada is already harder on piracy then many countries. In fact, by the Business Software Alliance's own numbers, piracy is declining in Canada. Our music industry is healthier than the US or Japan. And we're one of only a few countries in the world where you can get jail time for using a camcorder in a movie theater, and probably the only one in the world to have actually convicted a guy on that law.

But that's not enough for the big content distributors. They want a giant legal stick to club Canadian citizens with at random. They want it to be strong enough to push people into jail or bankruptcy, and versatile enough to be applied to anyone with little or no judicial oversight. They want their broken business model protected by federal law in the hopes that won't have to adapt to a world where distribution is free.

Thing is, it won't work. Despite 3 strikes laws being passed in France and Britain, piracy has still increased. And when the music industry sent out 30,000 letters in the UK threatening law suits if the accused didn't immediately pay thousands in protection money, few paid, it turned into a PR nightmare, and piracy still increased. Jamie Thomas got slapped with a very public judgment of $1.9 million in damages for sharing 24 songs, and piracy still increased. The only difference is that a few dozen people have had their lives destroyed because they got Lilo and Stitch 17 off of Limewire.

The reason none of these punitive or deterrent actions make an impact is because, like I've said before, the internet makes non-commercial copyright an impossible fantasy, and probably invalidates all digital copyright entirely.

by skreuzerA recent estimate showed that there will be 1.2 zettabytes of information transmitted, created, and duplicated on the internet in 2010. A zettabyte is roughly a thousand million terabytes. And over 75% of that data is a copy of other data. Not only is there no way even a tiny percentage of that stays within copyright law, but it's impossible to even consider enforcing copyright laws on that much information. Forget DRM, how do you even track and record the copyright licenses for 1.2 thousand million terabytes of data? That's an absolutely retarded idea.

Regardless, the content business and the US government have succeeded in convincing the PMO to ignore democracy, rationality, and our rights to due process. The Conservative government will resubmit C-61 to parliament in six weeks. If you have any interest in preserving your rights to rip DVDs to your computer, jailbreak your iPhone, or being free from corporate persecution for sharing an MP3, you'll send a letter to your MP and the government. I'm not going to sit here and let Disney try to shut down technological progress so they can sell Snow White DVDs for another 200 years.

Telco's are ripping us off

The Canadian telecommunications industry is essentially a oligopoly, group of corporations in collusion that strive to maintain consistent profit margins by cooperatively screwing the consumer from as many angles as possible. There are piles of evidence for this. Telus and Bell (the only two CDMA carriers in the country) insistuted fees for incoming text messages at exactly the same time. So now they get to charge twice for the same tiny packet of data. The equivalent of charging you to mail a letter, then charging the recipient to pick it up.

In a healthy competitive environment Rogers would have seen this as an opportunity to differentiate their service by not implementing the same pricing structure. That way they could take customers away from Bell and Telus. However, that didn't happen. Rogers knows that they stand to make more profit by implementing the same fees than they would by engaging in a price war, so starting in July, they will. This is price fixing. It may not be conspiratorial or organized, but it's still price fixing.

This adds to the already ridiculous idea that we are paying extra for text messaging to begin with. They are not charging for this service because it costs them money. It doesn't. In fact it's built so deeply into the cellular system that it actually costs them more money to monitor it and bill you than it would to just let you have it for free. When you pay a premium for an unlimited messaging service you are essentially subsidsizing the cost of tracking and billing other customers per message. At 20 cents per message you are paying $1300 per MB for that data, and because they bill twice for every message, they get $2600 per MB. This is price gauging at an unbelievable level.

And text messaging is just one facet of a hugely complicated prcing structure thats designed specifically to prevent you from directly comparing competitors and get you to pay the largest possible amount for the littlest possible service. They fracture the service into as many small pieces as possible and charge ridiculous prices for them individually in order to make the bundles look cheaper by comparison. 

They charge separately for call display, text messaging, email, voice, long distance and internet even though it's all similar data all travelling over the same network. (And charging for long distance is just lying, as if it costs more $0.35 a minute more to send data to Waterloo than it does to send data to Mississauga.) It would be as if when you purchased an internet connection you had to pay for a certain number of IM's per month, extra for accessing sites from the US, extra for watching video, extra for uploading files, and extra for using Skype. There would be protests in the streets if that was attempted, but it's tolerated on cellular service because we've been beaten by them for so long that we don't think to call the police anymore.

But changes are coming. There is no technical reason that you even need a voice plan or call display or voicemail or text messaging at this point. All you need is a smartphone, a data plan, Skype, and Google Talk. You could get about 1000 minutes of Skype on a 500MB data plan. But oh right, I almost forgot, you also need the cellular service providers to allow Skype on their network, and allow you to install it on the phone that you own. And that won't happen without a huge increase in competition or a government intervention.

The Canadian telecommunications industry is essentially a oligopoly, group of corporations in collusion that strive to maintain consistent profit margins by cooperatively screwing the consumer from as many angles as possible. There are piles of evidence for this. Telus and Bell (the only two CDMA carriers in the country) insistuted fees for incoming text messages at exactly the same time. So now they get to charge twice for the same tiny packet of data. The equivalent of charging you to mail a letter, then charging the recipient to pick it up.


by dulcie

In a healthy competitive environment Rogers would have seen this as an opportunity to differentiate their service by not implementing the same pricing structure. That way they could take customers away from Bell and Telus. However, that didn't happen. Rogers knows that they stand to make more profit by implementing the same fees than they would by engaging in a price war, so starting in July, they will. This is price fixing. It may not be conspiratorial or organized, but it's still price fixing.


by sashafatcat

This adds to the already ridiculous idea that we are paying extra for text messaging to begin with. They are not charging for this service because it costs them money. It doesn't. In fact it's built so deeply into the cellular system that it actually costs them more money to monitor it and bill you than it would to just let you have it for free. When you pay a premium for an unlimited messaging service you are essentially subsidsizing the cost of tracking and billing other customers per message. And at 20 cents per message you are paying $1300 per MB for that data, and because they bill twice for every message, they get $2600 per MB of what is essentially pure profit. 


by aresauburn™

And text messaging is just one facet of a hugely complicated prcing structure thats designed specifically to prevent you from directly comparing competitors and get you to pay the largest possible amount for the littlest possible service. They fracture the service into as many small pieces as possible and charge ridiculous prices for them individually in order to make the bundles look cheaper by comparison. 

They charge separately for call display, text messaging, email, voice, long distance and internet even though it's all similar data all travelling over the same network. (And charging for long distance is just lying, as if it costs more $0.35 a minute more to send data to Waterloo than it does to send data to Mississauga.) It would be as if when you purchased an internet connection you had to pay for a certain number of IM's per month, extra for accessing sites from the US, extra for watching video, extra for uploading files, and extra for using Skype. There would be protests in the streets if that was attempted, but it's tolerated on cellular service because we've been beaten by them for so long that we don't think to call the police anymore.


by malthe

But changes are coming. There is no technical reason that you even need a voice plan or call display or voicemail or text messaging at this point. All you need is a smartphone, a data plan, Skype, and Google Talk. You could get about 1000 minutes of Skype on a 500MB data plan. But oh right, I almost forgot, you also need the cellular service providers to allow Skype on their network, and allow you to install it on the phone that you own. And that won't happen without a huge increase in competition or a government intervention.


by acroll

Government taking comments on Net Neutrality

The CRTC has opened up an online forum for the next month to get the public's input on net neutrality and the protocol-discrimination policies of large ISP's in Canada like Rogers and Bell.


by SMN

I strongly encourage everyone to go take a look at these comments to get an idea of how the internet is being manipulated by the corporations in this country. Vote for the comments you agree with and add your own comments if at all possible. 

While I seriously doubt that the CRTC will actually read every comment on this site, if we are able to deluge them with enough input they will be unable to ignore it, and will be forced to realize that no internet user thinks that protocol-discrimination or traffic shaping based on content type are acceptable ways of dealing with network congestion.

We should be entitled to use the connection that we paid for in whatever manner we'd like within the law, and no ISP should be permitted to determine what content we are and are not allowed to produce or consume online. 

Do we even need politicans?

The representative democracy that seems all the rage these days isn't really necessary with today's technology. Part of the justification for a democratic republic, as opposed to a true democracy, is that up until very recently, the logistical issues with allowing every person to vote on every issue were prohibitive.


by psd

However the internet and cell phones remove these problems and make electronic voting possible, and politicians potentially redundant. Why do we need all the expense and ethical issues that come with electing representatives when we could just vote on bills ourselves?


by thorinside


Security and reliability has definitely been a concern with electronic voting so far. But despite a list of documented problems, electronic voting is becoming more and more popular throughout the world (Brazil does all voting in all elections electronically). If banking, bill payment, and stock trading can be made secure enough for everyday use by average citizens, then there is no reason that the same cannot be done for voting (and it has.. in other countries).

Access issues have to be considered. Grandpa and grandma may not want to learn how to use the internet in order vote on whether or not their health care gets cut off. People with extremely low incomes may have difficulty purchasing the sorts of technology necessary to vote electronically. But both of these problems are relatively minor. Over 70% of the Canadian population has internet access. Those that don't (poor people and old people) can walk to the library or pick up a phone if they don't have a computer. If you can order a pizza, or vote on Canadian Idol, you can vote for tax cuts.


by Garrettc


You also may have problems giving a stronger political voice to the guy in the next cubicle, who farts and thinks more about the WWE than the WWF. But then you'd be forgetting that Ted Stevens, an elected representative, referred to the internet as "a series of tubes" and "not a truck". Yes people are stupid, but politicians are people too. I'd rather have farting WWE guy be one voice in 30 million, than Ted Stevens be one voice in 100. And I can be sure that Exxon Mobil isn't bribing farting WWE guy.


by thepostalservice


The biggest problem is that since 2001, there has been an average of 291 bills introduced, and 34 passed per year. That's a fair bit of legislation to read up on. 24 bills to read a month and almost three bills to pass. And bills are not short. Frequently dozens, occasionally hundreds of pages.

That assumes that all the representatives actually read all the bills. They don't, they don't have the time. Within the party different bills are allocated to different representatives, who in turn probably delegate a fair bit of the grunt work to subordinates and interns. A few people then determine how each bill fits with the party politics, and the then party votes as a whole, despite that individually they probably haven't actually read what they are voting on.


by mstephens7

The general population would probably end up researching and voting on what they have interests in, not every single issue. This could actually improve legislation because in most cases, only those with a good deal of knowledge on a subject would take the time to vote on it. And psychos, psychos would vote alot.

In reality it's probably not possible to get rid of all politicians entirely. Perhaps something more like Canadian Parliament meets Wikipedia. There could be elected officials to introduce bills and moderate the process as the public contributes to and votes on changes to the bills. They would also be necessary for administration and foreign relations.


by kalavinka


A world without elected representatives may be a fantasy (a glorious, glorious fantasy) at this point, but I think that any increase in public participation and control over politics can only improve the system. Technology now makes this possible. Unfortunately we'd have to convince the politicians to vote themselves out of a job, so I guess it won't be happening.


by Tesla314

Fight Copyright Reform - You're about to become a criminal

Today the Canadian Copyright Reform bill will go before parliament. Among other things it would ban file sharing, severely restrict the use of P2P services through throttling, and make the unlocking of cell phones illegal, essentially making about 90% of the population below 30 criminals over night.


by designwallah

Here it is, folks, at long last: Industry Canada Minister Jim Prentice is about to introduce his Canadian version of America's disastrous Digital Millennium Copyright Act tomorrow. In so doing, he is violating his own party's promise to seek public consultation on all treaty accession bills, he's ignoring the cries of rightsholders, industry, educators, artists, librarians, citizens' rights groups, legal scholars and pretty much everyone with a stake in this, except the US Trade Representative and the US Ambassador, who, apparently, have had ample opportunity to chat with the Minister and give him his marching orders. via BoingBoing

In protest of this I emailed my MP, signed up on the Facebook group, and sent a letter to Harper, Prentence and Verner via this CCER form.

I would much rather have an election than have my rights continue to be infringed upon by huge corporations that already cause us to pay too much for music, internet, television, and cellular phone services. There is nothing in the Canadian Copyright Reform bill that in any way helps the general population, all it does is further entrench in law the ludidic and mafia-like practices of the communications and music industry.

Canada used to be a leader in communications technology and now we're paying more for worse service because of the semi-monopolistic practices of companies like Bell and Rogers.

Does the Canadian government take a greater interest in securing the out-dated business plans of huge corporations than it does in securing the freedoms of its population?

Who would have thought Canadian politics could be interesting?

So I spent about an hour after getting to work this morning talking about various Canadian politics. Granted most of it was spent complaining about the different ways that our elected officials have screwed up lately, but they have chosen to screw up in such interesting ways.


by greenhem

Maxime Bernier got the boot for leaving documents at his ex-girlfriends house which allegedly contained internationally sensitive information. Oh, and his ex is associated with organized crime. No biggie.


by Stuart R Brown

But frankly I found it a little convenient that she only chose to reveal this information now, after having them for over a month. Also, he apparently didn't know they were gone. Add to that the fact that she seems very bitter about the ending of their relationship and it becomes possible that she may have had a malicious hand in the disappearance and reappearance of these documents. Not that Maxime isn't capable of being a dumbass all by himself, his remarks about the govenor of Kandahar and tendency to promise flights on aircraft that don't exist prove that. But it is possible that she's not completely innocent in this whole thing either.


by irina slutsky

And then there's David Miller's idea for reducing gun crime by removing the only places where responsible people can fire a gun in a safe controlled environment. I'm sure that the Finch-area gangs will think twice about using their guns when they no longer have places to practice shooting, because they've been so concerned about accuracy in the past.


by athenamat

Don't get me wrong, I think that a debate about the merits of a handgun ban are very valid, and that that discussion is essential. But this move by Miller is clearly nothing more than a political target of opportunity so that he can look like he's "tough on guns" and "cares about the children" on the anniversary of a school shooting. You don't love guns and hate children do you?


by Bitpicture

News - World photovoltaic-solar leader? Ontario!

Apparently Sarnia is to be the site of the largest photovoltaic solar installation in North America, which is also larger than any current photovoltaic installation in the world.

The Ontario government has approved a California company's plan to build North America's largest photovoltaic solar farm, the provincial energy ministry announced Thursday.

OptiSolar Farms Canada Inc. of Arthur, Ont. — a subsidiary of California-based OptiSolar Inc. — will install more than one million solar panels at four farms outside Sarnia, Ont., providing the province with 40 megawatts of power by 2010. Ontario Energy Minister Dwight Duncan said that's enough to power 6,000 homes.

The reason for this, and many other pending solar facilities in Ontario is that the Ontario government has agreed to pay 42 cents per kilowatt-hour for solar, which is about 7 times the rate of non-green energy. Some critics have stated that while this is a good incentive for green energy in Ontario, it is a fundamentally unsustainable cost for energy and will inevitably have to be rescinded if it becomes too popular.