The controversy over “Net Neutrality” is all over the tech media these days. If you haven’t heard about it there are some great articles on Wikipedia to help you learn more:
The second Wikipedia article specifically about Canada is important because the Canadian telecommunications companies, who happen to be the largest Internet Service Providers, are on the leading edge of Internet Throttling (aka Bandwith Shaping) technology and they recently won a landmark ruling by the CRTC allowing them to continue this practice. The ruling does place some rules around the practice and also puts the onus on the telcos to prove that they are doing it only when required (eg. “as a last resort”) and only after fair warning has been given, but it still allows a practice that many users find abhorrent. This decision is precedent setting and will likely become the template for other government regulatory bodies in the near future.
My summary of Net Neutrality: Net Neutrality is a principle that argues that a given user should be able to access any web site or service with equal bandwidth as any other site or service, within the limitations (eg. bandwidth caps) of their internet access service plan. This means that ISP’s should not be able to limit or reduce the bandwidth available for access to certain types of service (eg. video on demand, torrent streams, or audio files) preferentially over other types of service (eg. email, searches, or blogs).
My Take on Net Neutrality: In this day and age of tiered internet access packages, where users pay different monthly fees depending on the instantaneous and monthly bandwidth quotas allotted to them, there should be no need for bandwidth shaping or traffic throttling. To do so is a form of discrimination. If a user pays for a certain amount of bandwidth then she should be able to freely choose how she distributes her use of that bandwidth. If she exceeds her monthly bandwidth cap then of course she should be charged more than another user that lives within his quota. But her decision on what sites or services to access should not be dictated by her internet service provider.
A Concrete Example: I choose to pay for the Hi-Speed Extreme package offered by Shaw Cable in Alberta, Canada. This package gives me up to 15 Mbps for downloads, 1 Mbps for uploads, and a monthly quota of 100 GB. Shaw also offers a Hi-Speed package (7.5 Mbps down, 0.5 Mbps up, 60 GB/month) for a little more than half the price of the extreme package, or a Hi-Speed Warp package (25 Mbps down, 2 Mbps up, 150 GB/month) for 4 times the cost! If my neighbor is paying 4 times as much for his internet service shouldn’t he be able to access whatever sites he want? Shouldn’t he be able to use all of his 25 Mbps right up to his 150 GB per month? If he exceeds 150 GB in a month then I totally understand charging him more, but if not, then what right would the ISP have to decide that a Video on Demand service offered by one company is more important than a similar service offered by another company?? It shouldn’t matter what package a user chooses to pay for; we should have the right to access the full bandwidth we’ve paid for, right up to the monthly quota included in that package.
If an ISP simply can’t accommodate users actually using the bandwidth they have paid for, then they should limit how much bandwidth they are selling, not what their customers do with it!
NOTE – I’m not getting any kickbacks from Shaw to post this here, and by no means should this be considered an endorsement OR a criticism of Shaw. I have been totally happy with the service I get from them and I haven’t seen any personal impact of Traffic Throttling or Bandwidth Shaping in the few months that I’ve been a customer of Shaw. I have heard a few complaints from other users though…
This may seem overly simple, but why should somebody else decide what sites or services are more important than others?? How do you feel about this? Am I missing something? Please use the comments to tell me how you feel about this.
