Results tagged “rockygaudrault”

On Monday night, the Gladstone Hotel held the first of three cross-Canada net neutrality discussions established by SaveOurNet.ca. Speakers included SaveOurNet co-founder Steve Anderson; Rocky Gaudrault, CEO of TekSavvy; Mark Surman, executive director of the Mozilla Foundation; Derek Blackadder, a national representative with CUPE; Raymi Lauren White, of Raymi the Minx; and Sass, of zucket.com. The panel discussed a variety of internet-related topics, including throttling, public infrastructure, and the oligopolies of Bell and Rogers, but most of the debate focused on the movement’s deepest problem: how to sell the concept of net neutrality to average Canadians.

For more than a year now, Canadian ISPs, net neutrality advocacy groups, and the CRTC have been battling over the issue of internet traffic management. ISPs, like Bell Canada and Rogers, argue that they need to manage their network traffic in order to stop BitTorrent users from hogging all the bandwidth; net neutrality advocacy groups, on the other side of the issue, believe that the ISPs should treat all internet traffic equally, with the limited exceptions of viruses and spam. Groups like SaveOurNet.ca also argue that Canadian ISPs are inflating the issue in order to gain the leverage necessary to create a lucrative tiered internet service, so that they can charge Canadians more for their access. Finally, somewhere in the middle, the CRTC has been listening to both sides of the argument.