Well, this shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone but documents recovered by the press have revealed the Tory proto-policy on net neutrality.

It seems that Industry Minister Maxime Bernier’s advisors recommended against implementing a Canadian version of the Net Neutrality Act. American legislation that ensures ISPs cannot charge for preferential usage of bandwidth.  This prevents a scenario where Time Warner can pay Telus to pipe those damned video banners at high-speed while that obscure Wikipedia article or video about African beetles trickles in with the leftover “free” bandwidth.

Net Neutrality is such a no-brainer policy I’m surprised there’s any controversy at all. The only companies that could possibly want it are headed up by avaricious baby-eating money-grubbers.

Not only am I including commentary here because this is one of those ultra-rare headlines that actually fulfills my blog’s obscure niche (technology and politics) but it’s also an extremely important issue that I don’t want lost on anyone.

The primary opponents to net neutrality, according to the article, are Telus and Videotron. Interestingly, Videotron along with others, recently refused to pay into the Canadian Television Fund. Someone needs to write some angry letters to Darren Entwistle (President & CEO of Telus) and Brian Mulroney (current board member at Quebecor the owner of Videotron).  Not mention our Minister of Industry Maxime Bernier about this.

What’s interesting is that spokespeople for the government are claiming that the Ministry is retaining an “open mind” about net neutrality. I don’t see what exactly there is to debate given the primary issue at hand - this is not an issue of strong controversy with many ethically equivalent sides arguing about something that is vague and far reaching. This is a very definite effort to curtail censorial efforts over what is designed to be a disinterested medium, this is not some “fuzzy” area of techno-mumbo-jumbo.

This is your phone company putting your family on hold whilst telemarketers can get through no problem. This is your library making you wait for books you want while handing you leaflets about phentermine and enlargement pills. This is your TV station making PBS and CBC broadcast a day late while ABC news and Fox get there right on time. The analogies are endless but fact of the matter is, I pay for access to the internet not for access to content ON the internet

Posted by Jeremy on Wednesday, February 7th, 2007 at 11:34 pm.