The "Net Neutrality War" comes to Canada.

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Nov 02, 2006 at 12:50:16AM -0500, Jason Carson wrote:
> I just wrote my MP and told him I support net neutrality.

Too bad net neutrality kills a bunch of neat applications for the
internet, like streaming video, VoIP, and many others.  ToS is part of
the internet, although not often used that much.  True net neutrality
means ToS can never be used for anything.

On the other hand wouldn't it be nice if rogers wasn't allowed to slow
down people's bittorrent traffic?

I do not buy the argument of the providers that google should be paying
them.  No that isn't the idea.  I as a customer should be paying you for
the internet access and traffic I have.  Google should be paying their
own provider for the internet access and traffic they cause there.  How
the large tier1 ISPs decide how to charge each other or not, is a
different issue.  If a rogers or bell customer wants to get data from
google, why should google pay for that, while if they decide to send a
ton of photos to some friends, there is no extra charge for that?  The
telecom companies are simply jelous of google's success at making money
from adds somehow, and want a piece of the pie, while of course not
really wanting to raise prices for their customers (although rogers
recently did for some services).  So they want money for improvements so
they can claim to have better service than their competition, but they
don't want to pay for it and they don't want to raise prices (which
makes you look bad compared to a cheaper competitor) so instead they
want to go after google, because they have lots of money, and are
popular.

I don't think net neutrality is the right thing to put into law.  I
think I should be able to go ask a provider to get me a garuanteed 1Mbit
from here to montreal for a price through the internet.  If that is how
I want to run phones using VoIP I should be able to.  I don't think they
should be allowed to block data, but I do think they should be allowed
to sell higher quality connections with ensured throughput for certain
traffic, while everything else can just do the usual first come first
served best effort thing it usually does with the unused bandwidth.

--
Len Sorensen
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