More Rants on Network Neutrality

This was in regards to someone who mistakenly thought that NN advocates wanted to see everyone have unlimited internet usage (regardless of whether the bandwidth was there). And that these decisions were business right.

The problem is not regarding usage. Bell and Rogers have a right to charge more for high bandwidth users, or for those who go over their set limit on usage. That is not the problem. The problem is that telecommunications companies have determined that certain types of traffic do not belong on their service. The comparison with flash is dead on, or picture your company's VPN traffic being slowed. They are using advanced network routers to say that traffic using a certain port or protocol deserves to be blocked or slowed. This isn't the first time this has happened, telephone companies offering DSL service have tried blocking startup VOIP companies by limiting their traffic. Do you use SKYPE? All it takes is Shaw to change a setting and your SKYPE account becomes unusable while their digital phone service works clear as day.

The problem is with business decisions. There is a serious economic and moral problem when networks and service providers are looking to get into the content creation and service side. They want as large of a chunk of the pie as possible and are using their monopoly over transmission lines to stifle new services. Cable TV companies now have to compete with iTunes movie store and services like Joost, which the internet has allowed in real laissez-faire environment, and to preserve their existing business they are prepared to tear apart the foundations of the internet to do so. Why? You can't sell movie channels at high rates if people have other options.

The bandwidth problem is a real issue. Don't get me wrong, none of the egalitarian crowd is stupid or technologically ignorant. Networks are overloaded because they have gone out promising everyone 5mb/s download speeds and unlimited internet access. Basically, they have oversold their capacity and feel that if they block out P2P traffic, they can still keep advertising unsustainable data rates while blocking anyone who actually uses it. It is false advertising, misleading consumers, and other wonderful tricks of the trade. Some misuse their services, download 100GB worth of TV shows a week, but the solution is for networks to only promise or sell what they can support.

If there was real choice in ISPs (Internet Service Providers), this probably would not be as big of an issue. We have put up protectionist policy, which most Canadian's support to keep telecommunications companies Canadian, but this comes with a limited choice. To reach all of Canada, governments have provided telecommunication companies with subsidies to help lay fiber to communities and free use of public property for transmission lines. The ISPs must respect that their business success has come not without substantial public investment.

To make matters worst, many of the so-called ISP choices sublet network space from the monopolies, and now are having their businesses put to the test because they are basically having their contracts broken by having their traffic shaped as well.

Anyways, I hope you understand the issue. If you run a business that is based on the internet, and Shaw, Bell, or Rogers wanted to launch a competing service, there is nothing to prevent them from slowing your traffic down if we don't stand up to enforce Canadian laws. The issue before us right now is mainly focussed on P2P, but it is not limited to that. A number of ISPs have already blocked VPN ports, so they can charge more for VPN capable service. There has been attacks on VOIP in the US, but thankfully some states in the US had legislation that allowed the VOIP providers to sue the ISPs. Google got involved because some ISPs thought Google should share some of their profits because they were worth more than the ISPs and the ISPs own search areas were not being used.

Ultimately the ISP mentality is this: "Why oh, why did we screw up and allow the Internet to develop as is. Google, Yahoo, and others are worth hundred of billions, and now we've lost the ability to offer services ala carte. Now TV is coming over the internet, and what can we do to stop it from eroding our pay per view services.?"

Want to know why Canadians don't have access to high quality wireless internet service and have to pay so much to search the web on cell phone? Because wireless ISPs realize that if they start off by filtering data services and only introduce their own slowly, they can ensure they don't have to compete with any other content producers.

Network Neutrality advocates are not here to solely protect people who rip movies from theatres. We enjoy innovation, freedom, and the ability for small companies to compete with bigger one and we want to ensure that if we pay for 100GB of data and 2mb/s download then we actually get it.