Google says Bell Canada is violating Canadian telecommunications law by slowing Internet traffic and is requesting the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) take action against the company.
"Bell claims its throttling of peer-to-peer applications is a reasonable form of network management. Google respectfully disagrees. Network management does not include Canadian carriers' blocking or degrading lawful applications that consumers wish to use," Google said in a statement to the CRTC.
Other complaints to the CRTC about Internet throttling have been made by industry associations. The CRTC is investigating the throttling and said it will release a report in the fall.
"From consumer, competition and innovation perspectives, throttling applications that consumers choose is inconsistent with a content and application-neutral Internet, and a violation of Canadian telecommunications law, which forbids unfair discrimination and undue or unreasonable preferences and requires that regulation be technologically and competitively neutral," Google said.
Bell first started slowing the speeds of its Sympatico Internet subscribers in November and later did the same to its wholesale customers in March. The company claims that the growing number of peer-to-peer users was threatening to lead to slowdowns for its entire customer base.
Google said to protect consumer choice and innovation on the Internet the CRTC should require Bell and other ISPs to end its throttling practices.
"The Internet is simply too important to allow them to act as such a gatekeeper," Google said. "Protecting end user choice is the central issue in this proceeding, but also a much larger issue. It goes to the heart of the Internet and how it acts as an extraordinary platform for innovation and fair competition."
Gooogle is also getting a new senior vice president and chief financial officer from Bell Canada. Patrick Pichette was president of operations at the company.
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Usage Caps
Looks like Bell Canada will have to do what some U.S. ISPs are doing and implement usage caps. Go over your cap and you're cut off for the month or you pay a per gigabyte fee.
This is just back of envelope, but if ISPs charged 40 cents a gigabyte above a monthly max of say 100, someone who was fully saturating a 10 megabit line 24/7 with constant downloads (because let's remember that many ISPs are still only providing 320-640 kilobits upload speed on their 3-8 megabit download speed packages), that hardcore downloader would get a bill for about $1260 for the 3+ terabytes of data he/she downloaded that month.
On the other hand, the average home user who watches a few videos on you tube, does some surfing, IM's a bit, and sends some photos and files via e-mail every day would have NOTHING to worry about.
It's totally easy for the ISPs to do it that way and some already are. Others, like Comcast (which claims it stopped slowing down apps), have unofficial limits (90 or so gigs for Comcast, IIRC) that they can choose to enforce if you're a regular violator.
Throttling is not the answer. All applications should be treated equally, but it's not unfair to expect that the users who eat up more than their fair share of bandwidth should pay for their excesses.
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