Later this week will see two major internet rulings being made by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), the first is for metered use of the internet and the other is for net neutrality.
Extensive public hearings were held during the summer by the CRTC to discuss whether “net neutrality” was guaranteed by laws that currently existed and to decide how much leeway broadband service providers should be allowed in managing their own network. The removal of an ISPs ability to discriminate against particular kinds of internet traffic over its network in an unfair way is referred to as ‘net neutrality.’
A fight between the network operator Bell Canada and its smaller wholesale internet customers led to the beginning of the recent hearings. Wholesale companies who rent a small part of the operator’s network to provide services to their own customers recently had the speed of certain uses of the internet, primary peer-to-peer traffic, slowed down as Bell decided to extend this slow-down policy to these companies. A complaint that Bell was attempting to remove their ability to differentiate between services was raised by a number of smaller ISPs like Eagle and TekSavvy.
A review was launched by the regulator into the greater issue of net neutrality and network management, although its immediate ruling was that Bell was not violating its wholesale obligation by throttling network traffic. The throttling of certain types of internet traffic is also carried out by a number of the bigger ISPs in Canada.
The decision made by the CRTC to allow the policy extension to continue was the right one according to Bell which advised that in order to limit any network abuse by heavy downloaders a usage based billing system was absolutely necessary.
Source – CBC