Is the tide turning on Bell Canada and Net Neutrality in Canada? Hope so.

The story about Bell Canada throttling traffic on its network is building steam.  I covered this a bit yesterday in my post, but Michael Geist adds a couple new wrinkles to this that I hadn’t considered:

Sources advise that the company was regularly asked about its intentions and that it consistently assured ISPs that throttling would not apply to wholesale services. Now that the company has dropped that pretense, the business community is left to wonder whether it will soon target business VPN traffic or broadcasters like the CBC for their streamed traffic.  This represents a fundamental reshaping of the Internet in Canada as we pay (literally) for the dire lack of competition and independent ISPs gear up for likely legal challenges.  Regardless of those outcomes, it will become increasingly apparent that the regulators and politicians can no longer remain silent. Source: Michael Geist – The Bell Wake-Up Call

The specter of my ISP throttling back VPN traffic is pretty scary.  How can Canada expand and improve it’s tech industry when we have to worry about ISPs degrading the performance of one of the essential parts of our work?

Will politicians get involved now?  There is a Facebook group (I joined as a show of support) that has over 450 members and growing asking to prevent this kind of activity by Bell, Telus, Rogers, and others.

Ben Lucier has more commentary on this and it has hit the Globe and Mail as well so what can we really do?

Without real competition, as Michael points out, we’re quite stuck.  Couple this with the appallingly high cost of mobile data rates in Canada, we’re looking at Canada, once a tech leader, becoming a tech laggard.

There are statements from Rogers and Telus about traffic shaping, but nothing I’ve seen from Shaw as yet … as tech professionals we need to keep this issue alive and kicking, maybe the politicians will notice–eventually.