I’m shocked — shocked — that the CRTC sided with Bell Canada and not consumers or smaller Internet service providers when it gave Bell the thumbs up for “traffic shaping” on its wholesale Internet service, the practice of slowing down customers who are using peer-to-peer file sharing services like BitTorrent. I guess this is what the CRTC meant when it said it “won’t regulate the Internet” nine years ago.
Since this was a Bell-specific decision, the CRTC has now promised to address the issue of net neutrality more formally by June 2009. Ah, the glacial pace of government regulators. Given its historical favour for big industry over consumers, and given that it has already decided Bell really does have “congestion”, I’m pretty pessimistic about what this means. As the omnipresent Michael Geist points out, “the debate is changing from whether there should rules on network management to what those rules should be.”
The only real positive to come out of today’s decision is that the CRTC ordered Bell to be more transparent about network management policies and to give advanced noticed to its wholesale customers when it changes those policies.
