GATINEAU – According to the Campaign for Democratic Media, the CRTC’s hearing into network traffic management is about nothing less than “who will determine the way we use the Internet,” David Fewer, acting director of CIPPIC told commissioners Thursday morning.
Leaving network management practices up to the discretion of the networks owners can only invite disaster and make Canada “a backwater of online innovation,” he added. “The Canadian Internet is not simply the private property of Canadian ISPs.” (CIPPIC is the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic and a member of the CDM.)
While that may be true when it comes to the Internet experience, the resources that can be delivered to consumers and even wholesale customers, the wires, routers, CMTS and so forth are private property – which can be viewed as the crux of all the arguing this week, if you’re so inclined. Rogers’ network belongs to Rogers. Same for Bell, Telus, Cogeco, Videotron and so forth. It’s the way they act (or the way some people fear they could act) that has drawn the ire of consumer groups.
“But we can not let the private trump the resource,” added Fewer. “This is Canada’s Internet.”
As has been well documented by Cartt.ca and others, ISPs have been limiting P2P traffic, mostly on the upstream, to make sure their networks run smoothly for all. They slow, but do not block such traffic, which can consume much bandwidth. This is not equitable, is unfair and against the regulations, said CDM’s co-founder Steve Anderson.
“It’s antithetical to the principle of common carriage… and anti-competitive.”
What the ISPs should be doing better, he said is provisioning, expanding their capacity and not clamping down on certain applications – and at the very least properly informing customers of their network management procedures so that what they do is at least somewhat transparent. “Functional marketplaces meet demand with supply, not by squashing demand,” added Fewer.
CDM told the Commission that under the regs, “P2P-specific traffic management is discriminatory, is a prima facie violation of s. 36, and conflicts with the Policy Objectives,” said Anderson.
If ISPs want to throttle certain apps, they should have to apply for permission first, added Anderson. CRTC chairman Konrad von Finckenstein though, added that this would likely be a problem. “We are complaint-based,” he said, noting that there are no complaints before the Commission on this at the moment.
However, arguing over P2P just may be old news, noted some of Thursday’s panellists since live streaming has passed P2P as the preferred way to consume video on the net. “P2P will continue to play a role, but not as large,” said Dr. David Reed, an MIT professor and leading Internet thinker who was also on the CDM panel.
Plus, overall web traffic growth is slowing, added Dr. Andrew Odlyzko, something he said he finds puzzling and can’t quite yet explain.
But perhaps the most ironic bit of the day came from Dr. Odlyzko, who is a University of Minnesota professor and appearing on behalf of network neutrality advocate CDM. When asked by CRTC vice-chair telecom Len Katz about the network owned and run by his university, Dr. Odlyzko painted a picture of a far less than neutral network.
Students face all sorts of rules on what they can and can’t do on the U of M network and the school even employs full time people to respond to takedown notices on certain content posted on the web, he said. Speeds to the dorms, he noted, also have to be throttled “to make sure the demand does not fill up all of the pipes.”
Which is a message we’d bet will be front and centre tomorrow and Monday when the big ISPs face the Commission. First up Friday morning is Telus.
