It’s officially time to say: “The HELL with BELL!” And the CRTC can now become just one more corrupt government agency that is completely out of touch with the industry it is set to oversee and protect.
Bell Canada Inc. is not breaking any laws by slowing Internet speeds and will be allowed to continue throttling its customers, the CRTC has ruled. — The CBC
Not only is the CRTC going to turn a blind eye to Bell’s anti-competitive behaviour of restricting and diminishing access to content from third party providers in order to better promote it’s own services. But the CRTC are completely ignoring the fact that Bell illegally broke contracts by throttling and metering the CAIP ISP’s who had signed up to resell straight pipes or as some would say clean tubes!
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“Based on the evidence before us, we found that the measures employed by Bell Canada to manage its network were not discriminatory,” said CRTC chair Konrad von Finckenstein in a release. “Bell Canada applied the same traffic-shaping practices to wholesale customers as it did to its own retail customers,”
The practice should not justified because Bell is already screwing the consumer in the same way. Even with Google and Skype backing the independent resellers and consumers, the CRTC chose to side with the Money. This is yet another example of how the individuals, the consumer’s, THE CANADIAN CITIZEN’s rights are not as important as pleasing big business.
“The broader issue of internet traffic management raises a number of questions that affect both end-users and service providers,” von Finckenstein said. “We have decided to hold a separate proceeding to consider both wholesale and retail issues. Its main purpose will be to address the extent to which internet service providers can manage the traffic on their networks in accordance with the Telecommunications Act.”
So the CRTC is now going to spend more of our precious tax money and hold another hearing where the original question, the original issue of basic rights will be twisted and morphed and never actually answered. Our Cousins to the south took a much harder link on this when they rapped Comcast over the knuckles for the exact same behaviour.
“This practice is not ‘minimally intrusive’ but invasive and outright discriminatory,” the FCC said in its ruling. “Consumers are entitled to run applications and use services of their choice.”2
The Internet was not pioneered by the military and academics, then championed and promoted by the tech savvy until it become the mainstream part of every one’s life as it is today just so Big Corps like Bell and Comcast can use to sell their own overpriced media and service at the expense of it’s competition. The is a very clear line between SERVICE providers and CONTENT providers that Bell and Rogers tried to fudge when they partners up with Microsoft and Yahoo a few years back, this was allowed to pass and now we have are all paying the price for the CRTC inaction and inability to impose an kind of law on the last frontier.
One thing is for sure when things go wrong like this in a fundamental way, consumer speak with their own wallet. Just ask the RIAA and the American car manufacturers. I foresee a lot of movement as people switch to independent service providers that offer unmetered and and checked Internet access. You can also bet that wireless bandwidth theft go on the rise as a result of rulings like this one. Our household has already set the wheels in motion to bail from Bell’s tyrannic and insane trio of lame ass services.
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You can read more about this here:
CRTC Rules Against Indie ISPs In Throttling Dispute DSL Reports (real folk who care about the Net)
CRTC backs Bell Canada traffic throttling Peer 2 Peer .net
CRTC allows Bell to continue internet throttling The CBC
CRTC denies Internet ‘traffic shaping’ complaint The Globe and Mail
Warning the Globe and Mail belongs to CTVglobemedia which is turn belongs to BCE == BELL The opinions will inherently be biased.