Results tagged “saveournetca”

This week, NOW Magazine called out Jesse Brown, of TVO’s Search Engine, over comments Brown made on Monday night at SaveOurNet.ca’s Open Internet Town Hall meeting at the Gladstone Hotel. If you missed our coverage of the net neutrality event, here’s what Brown said: "NOW Magazine, Rabble.ca, the absent Mrs. Chow—is it necessarily a good idea to align net neutrality with the far left in Canadian politics? I can see it just as easily being a right-wing free market libertarian issue…why don’t we keep net neutrality neutral and put up a big tent, and everybody who cares about it can get under?"

For almost a year and a half now, some of Canada’s major ISPs, including Bell and Rogers, have defended their throttling practices by arguing that excessive BitTorrent traffic is crippling their networks. Open-internet proponents, like Michael Geist, SaveOurNet.ca, and even Google, have questioned the telecoms' motives and asked the CRTC to step in and stop throttling. Geist further argues that throttling, high prices, and slow speeds, are reducing Canada’s competitiveness in the new digital economy. Today, a report released by the OECD on broadband growth and distribution, revealed that Canada’s broadband services are among the slowest and the most expensive in the developed world. In terms of price per megabyte, Canada ranks twenty-eighth overall, just ahead of Mexico and Poland. With the CRTC’s July traffic-management hearings fast approaching, net-neutrality advocates are working overtime to spread awareness of the issues and rally Canadians behind their cause.

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.

For a year now, several of Canada's ISPs, including Bell, Rogers, Cogeco, Shaw, and a few others, have been throttling BitTorrent transfers, frustrating subscribers and internet wholesalers like TekSavvy. Two weeks ago, we noted that the CRTC was investigating the throttling practices of Canada's ISPs, and while the formal hearings won’t begin until July 6, 2009, the commission's deadline for public submissions is only two days away. So far, if February is any indication, it looks like the net neutrality crowd is winning the media campaign. Last week, the major ISPs undermined their position when they released statistics to the CRTC that showed that the growth in total internet traffic volume declined in Canada between July 2005 and August 2007. These statistics raise an important question: if network traffic growth is slowing down, then why are network management policies necessary all of a sudden? More likely than not, certain ISPs are choosing to slow down access to the forms of media they either sell, or hope to sell. It's not a coincidence that Telus, who has shown little interest in online media, doesn't throttle its customers.