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.

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.