Liberals called on to support Net Neutrality
And I, for one, think it would be a great idea if they decided to do so.
The union, which released its letter to Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion on its website on Monday, said urgent net neutrality action is needed in light of recent moves by service providers, including Bell Canada Inc. and Rogers Communications Inc., to limit the speeds of certain internet applications. Dion was called on to take a "clear stand" in support of such legislation.
"These internet service providers are, with little or no public accountability, implementing measures that will discriminate against the use of legal software for legitimate uses. This is unacceptable," wrote NUPGE president James Clancy. "The potential for violations of the privacy rights of users is clear. The continued silence on these matters by the CRTC and the Canadian government violates the trust the Canadian people have placed in our public institutions."
The Tories, needless to say, aren't so hot about the idea.
Prentice had rebuffed earlier questioning by Angus in the House of Commons and said the Conservatives were not in favour of regulating the internet.
"We have a well advanced internet system in this country. It is not publicly regulated," he said in the exchange earlier this month. "At this point in time we will continue to leave the matter between consumers on the one hand and internet service providers on the other."
As one of the commenters on the CBC story put it, "So it's the deep pockets and strong arm tactics of Bell on one hand, and people who have no choice on the other...and that's the way the Tories like it."
While the fat cats may be happy with the way things are, any Canadian that actually pays attention shouldn't be. After all, why pay good money for a certain internet speed that the company your paying all that good money too can just decide to slow everything down when you want to use it for something where the speed is actually important? And that doesn't even get into the whole splicing of content thing.
More to the point, allowing carriers to play around with internet traffic strangles competition and innovation, which is why other parts of the planet are passing North America by. Ian Welsh made this point quite a while back in, "Why Japan is Eating America's Lunch On Broadband".
Broadband access is exactly the same. The US is getting its lunch eaten. As SaveTheInternet points out, they get access that is often 30x faster than the US. As a result they are experiencing innovation - and enjoying applications, that Americans simply don't get. As this WPost story says:
The speed advantage allows the Japanese to watch broadcast-quality, full-screen television over the Internet, an experience that mocks the grainy, wallet-size images Americans endure.
Ultra-high-speed applications are being rolled out for low-cost, high-definition teleconferencing, for telemedicine — which allows urban doctors to diagnose diseases from a distance — and for advanced telecommuting to help Japan meet its goal of doubling the number of people who work from home by 2010.
Oh, and all that speed - costs less too.
Now, ten years ago Japan had slower internet than the US. So they looked to the US to see how to do it - and they saw that the US had open access laws (where in the old days, companies could buy access to the lines at wholesale rates - which is why there was an ISP on every corner in the 90's) and decided they were key.
So they opened up broadband access - mandated that phone and cable lines had to be available to whoever wanted access. As SaveTheInternet points out:
If this quaint idea of “competition” seems familiar, that’s because America invented “open access” policies in the first place. And open access worked for decades to bring lower prices and more choices in long-distance phone service and dial-up Internet access.
The Japanese first adopted open access because they were worried about falling behind us. But under pressure from our own phone and cable monopolists, the Bush administration abandoned open access – and the fundamental protections for Net Neutrality along with it.
Now they’re standing idly by as America drops further and further behind the rest of the world in every measure of broadband progress.
Now here's the thing. What we're talking about is the Republican administration reducing competition. In a competitive market this wouldn't have happened. When you're dealing with a natural monopoly (and phone and cable lines are natural monopolies because driving more than one each to each home doesn't make sense) you have to legislate the market in such a way as to make sure competition exists. The free market can't do its thing if there isn't a market - and in most of the US there isn't a market. You have at best two possible suppliers. Often one. And in many areas - if you want "high" speed - none.
The modern "conservative" fallacy is that free markets means lack of government regulation. That isn't even close to what it means - what it means is a market with many actors, relatively transparent information, and no one actor or group with pricing power, whether through collusion or monopoly.
Switch Republican for Conservative in the above article, and you have the current situation in Canada, (though it remains to be seen if the Liberals will do the right thing on this). The way things are set up now allows for the natural monopolies to strangle competition, and with little or no competition, the drive to improve service or speed becomes non-existant.
Canadians deserve better, and that means making sure that Net Neutrality becomes the law of the land.
