It’s always fun when big companies can’t keep their stories straight. The Canadian government’s Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission is hosting a hearing for service providers who are expected to argue that they need to violate what we have come to know as net neutrality with methods like deep packet inspection. Their claim is that to provide good service, they need to be able to target P2P data transactions and slow them down so that the malevolent hacker in his mom’s basement can’t destroy your connection by downloading the entirety of “Xena: Warrior Princess.”
Those are the words of a report filed by Shaw Communications, yet the companies chief exec Jim Shaw says that his company has no way of identifying what specific data is, that Shaw Communications can only ever tell how much bandwidth you are using. So rather than stopping illegal filesharers, any throttling technologies applied by providers is likely to just throttle anyone who is using a lot of bandwidth. High bandwidth activities aren’t just limited to filesharing – streaming movies and television shows, an ever-growing use of bandwidth for people online, takes up a good amount of the tubes. Additionally, we should not forgot that filesharing is not illegal. We could name a lot of very legitimate uses for protocols like bit torrent, as I’m sure you can too.
As of now, the state of Canada’s net neturality laws is nebulous. The point of the hearing is to clarify whether Canada does have laws which require providers to be neutral, and if laws on the books do not serve this function, to let the government know if they should pass net neurality laws. In the states, we have them, and they’re a very positive force – for one thing, they limit providers’ ability to deprive consumers of functionality. In my book, that’s a very good thing, and I’m hoping the Canadian government will think so, too.
(Original story via Michael Geist)
