The National Post has a story this morning that suggests Rogers would like federal regulators to stay clear of “crafting new rules for how carriers can manage the flow and speed of Web traffic on their networks”. They argue any technology they use to employ traffic shaping are purely for the larger good – slow down a few to help the majority on the Internet. Apparently, Rogers is looking out for the general populace.
Well hopefully the federal regulator doesn’t believe them. That’s kind of like putting the cat in charge of looking after the mouse house. Enough is enough.
Rogers and Bell should be regulated like the utilities that they are. Maybe, we should hold a hearing on breaking up Rogers and Bell. In actual fact, Rogers controls both the pipeline and the content on that pipeline. And what content might they be trying to regulate … VoIP, Internet TV ?
Who’s to say the next step, once and if the federal regulators side with Rogers argument is that Rogers won’t throttle some of the very bandwidth they’re trying to sell to their customers. Notice that many of the Internet TV stations available to U.S. viewers aren’t available in Canada – HBO.com, ABC.com’s live streaming of TV shows. Those aren’t available in Canada. It’s these regulators that push for these bans.
The world is becoming internet/ IP based, and more and more content is flowing down these networks. We’re heading down a slippery slope – I’m hoping the CRTC realizes that.
For more thoughts about the CRTC hearings looking into Net Neutrality and network management, check out Michael Geist’s blog where you can find a summary of the hearing’s sixth day from Sean Murtha, a law student at the University of Ottawa. Cartt.ca also provides some insight.
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All I can say is this is oh so true. I don’t use Rogers or Bell for this reason. I run on a PPP connection because I just hate the liberties that Rogers and Bell take with their mindless users. The same users that’d give their SIN number to Facebook if they put a form field on the site.
I recently spent two whole days working or a friend’s company fixing all of their computers after they let Bell’s tech support come in and try to “Fix” their problems. I couldn’t sway them from using Bells firewall/virus package at an additional charge when I repeatedly showed them that for free I could give them twice the protection because it had been recommended by “His Internet provider to best protect him while using their service”.
Now this is an extreme but it does speak (at least I feel) to how they swindle their users and just rape them with the same sort of profiteering and uninformed mark-ups that other companies (Like Microsoft) enjoy spewing at the technologically incompetent.
To summarise:
The educated can’t win because the monopolies own the ignorant by the motherboard.