Net Neutrality

by david on March 20, 2007

Mark has made a call to arms about net neutrality. Phillip reminds us that net neutrality is a grassroots media issue. The best description why net neutrality is important is:

“Our past Industrial economy was largely built on top of what could be called “Road Neutrality”. The road networks, largely owned and managed by various levels of government, charged taxes to pay for them but didn't charge based on the “value” of what people were transporting. I believe most rational people would realize that our capitalist economy could not exist without this common transportation infrastructure working that way.”
Russel McOrmand

Net neutrality is like wireless phone number portability. It is the role of the Canadian government to enact legislation to protect Canadian consumers from the telecommunications oligopoly it has created. The CRTC Commissioners are largely representatives of large media and telecommunications companies. Their backgrounds, experiences and interests are more inline with corporations being regulated than the consumers they are intended to protect. These corporations are not afraid to use their dominate positions to bully, intimidate and charge consumers. We need to encourage, petition, and vote for politicians that support net neutrality and are willing to enact new net neutrality supporting legislation.

Save the Internet: Fight for Internet Freedom! Sign the the petition at “Net Neutrality”:

Popularity: 1% [?]

  • Colin Henderson

    Absolutely .. they should not be able to limit what we see/ access/ use online.

  • David Crow

    Charging for services is not what I'm against. Charging two different entities for the same service is what I'm against.





    I pay for a connection to access content. Youtoogle pays for a connection to serve content. Should Youtoogle have to pay again to for customers on Bell or AT&T or other major telco? This is basically the telco determining what you can view. If Youtoogle doesn't want to pay the telco tax then you don't see that content. Look at the telcos and their access to wireless data, we accept that Telus keeps a walled garden to keep out "unsavory" wireless videos, sites, etc. from their customers. I don't want these corporations determining what I can see. What if Rogers only allowed you to see Yahoo!? What if they blocked Google, AOL, MSN/Sympatico/Live? Is this acceptable?

  • Colin Henderson

    In fairness to the telco’s they paid for the pipes that the internet runs on. They did that expecting to charge for services. If we push this argument too far, the government would take over internet; is that better? What if its the French Government – we all have to learn French, and praise Chirac.

    This descirbes well the work and the people behind internet infrastructure.

    <a href="http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html

    " target="_blank"><a href="http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html

    " target="_blank">http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html

    I would suggest its less Road Neutrality, than it is language neutrality. Consider &#8230; no-one tells David Crow what language he should rant in, any more than I may rant in Scottish if it makes me feel better.

    I am ok with the telco&#8217;s charging for access, and the the market dynamics should determine that price, more than government regulation. But they cannot tell me what I should look at or how I should use internet.

    To me thats what net-neutrality should be &#8230; freedom to access/ use/ anything I want, just as industrial age people were permitted to converse in any way they saw fit, whether it be hand signals, bearing gifts, or words.

  • Rohan Jayasekera

    To save the Internet, don&#8217;t we have to let the people who run it (like the ISPs) tweak it for proper operation? Like giving BitTorrent traffic lower priority if necessary?

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