Saturday
Aug282010
Net Neutrality is Dying in Canada
Saturday, August 28, 2010 at 1:42PM 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.
