The net neutrality debate in Canada - both sides of the story, sort of...

I did a story on Citytv Wednesday night about net neutrality.  Check out the story below, along with Professor Andrew Clement's take on this cause (unedited interview).  Today CBC Newsworld featured a chat with Clement, so hopefully as more and more media start to cover net neutrality we might get to hear the ISP's side of the story (as you'll see in my story, Rogers and Bell are a little camera shy on this issue).

Comments

[Kevin McArthur]

Amber, I really liked your story and the CBC peice was good too [though they didn't give the petition a link :( ]

The more people who know about Net Neutrality the better...

Theres a lot of FUD on Net Neutrality being put out by various people.. some of which I've responded to in the first comment, here.

http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/1678/135

The tyee also ran a story on Net Neutrality back in january and that can be read here:

http://thetyee.ca/Mediacheck/2007/01/17/NetNeutrality/

As for our site, well, the petition is up to 1754 signatures today.

[dan]

Of course the real question is why our elected politicians are letting Net Neutrality die.

[Walter Crespo]

I saw that story Amber, very good. Interesting to hear about how things are different in Canada from the way things are here. I'm heading over now to see what you are covering next. Yes gots to have my daily Amber Mac as prescribed by my physician Dr. Feelgood. XD

[netneutral]

Amber,
Finally ! Some 'journalism' from you instead of straight ol' 'reporting'. If you want to be taken seriously, you have to undertake more stories of this nature. But.....they can be risky to persue...

[Russell McOrmond]

Mark Goldberg and I did a bit of a back-and forth on my BLOG in late march based on a letter to the editor I wrote (which was published) in the Hill Times. This was a follow-up to an article he wrote called "Beware the 'peoples' republic' of 'net neutrality,'". If you click on the Net Neutrality topic on our website you will see other related articles.

It is interesting to see how different people seem to be debating about different things. For me this is all about protecting the End-to-End design principle of the Internet. I believe that not requiring permission and/or additional payment from any intermediary to create and deploy a new service is the critical design feature that has enabled all of the Innovation on the Internet. It is this design feature that differentiates it from the phone network of the past. While we can talk about the various effects of violating this principle that are discussed in the Net Neutrality debate, it all comes down to a pretty simple engineering design principle.

[James N. Tay]

Thank you Amber for highlighting this! The Canadian public sorely needs to know more about Network Neutrality before bell/rogers throws a surprise bomb on us.

Not to say that this is something entirely new.. Rogers has already been engaging in traffic shaping for some time now in a bid to keep its bandwidth down.

This is very much about what network neutrality is all about. If they are already slowing down the use of things like bit torrent, it will not be long before they establish a fast - slow lane?

Russell: I agree with you. Any sort of regulation of the Internet to preserve its freedom will not work. The internet is free very simply because it is not regulated. Once you open it to some regulation, by business people..it might be a slippery down hill slope from there. And yes, the internet has only been able to evolve such as blogs, mobblogging, web 2.0 because of its architecture. Mess with that, and ..I don't even want to imagine the consequences..

[Jebs House]

I'm not sure what the hold-up is... maybe they have re-thought their stance on how this is going to actually make the company any money. Or perhaps their lawyers pointed out the liability of providing agents a platform to stick their feet in their mouth. Whatever it is, it's hardly something I'd claim as being "Well done".
www.jebshouse.com