Mark, where does this leave CBC’s bit torrent distribution of programming? If a television program takes a long time to download, it’s much less useful to the viewer than if it is available quickly. In this case, it strikes me that the decision to throttle the traffic is arbitrary, and hardly democratic.

Thanks for the comment.

It is my understanding that during 2/3 of the day, there are no restrictions being imposed. Downloading a program during off peak hours seems to be a reasonable compromise. We aren’t talking about watching a sporting event in real-time - in fact, the measures appear to have been designed to preserve capacity for streaming media.

Should ISPs be trying to determine which torrents should be a priority over others? I think that raises other policy questions? Should the application providers be able to charge fees to content providers to have their media move better through the reduced capacity?

How is the decision to treat all torrents equally discriminatory?

Most broadband providers also own media assets of their own (and if they don’t, they’ll be acquiring some in the years ahead). You seem to paint a picture that suggests the broadband providers will resist the temptation to give a higher priority to their own online media. If that is the case, you are putting a lot more faith in the broadband providers than they deserve, in my opinion. The traffic shaping of today will inevitably lead to ‘selective shaping’ in the years ahead.

Do Shaw, Bell, Rogers, etc. publish guidelines for their customers that detail how they handle traffic? That would be useful in planning when to conduct certain Internet activities, including downloading files or streaming video.

I think the lack of public concern about this problem is the lack of knowledge about it. A good way to explain is if you had Rogers cable, and they had a deal with NBC and CTV...all NBC & CTV programs would show up at their scheduled time, but CBC, CBS, ABC, etc would always start between 5 and 15 minutes later than their scheduled time.

So, unless your favourate station station paid off Rogers, you will not get the service you expect. And, if course, this raises the whole spectre of Payola in a totally different format.

To take this scenario into the internet realm. Rogers has a deal with Yahoo, so you might have to wait longer to get results back from Google’s, or Microsoft’s search engines, or find that when accessing your Hotmail and Gmail accounts they take forever to load, but your Yahoo mail pops up instantly.

And that is just the thin edge of the problem.

Imagine, f Rogers and Yahoo signed an even more restrictive deal that didn’t slow down Gmail and Hotmail, but totally blocked them? There is no law that I am aware of that would prevent them from doing so. If they felt they could make money doing it it this way, they could.

If, on the other hand, we had some sort of binding net neutrality agreement, then the Payola of the Internet would be clipped at the bud.

Farrell -

The scenario you paint doesn’t hold, because there are already anti-discrimination rules in place in Canada. I wrote about this a little more than a year ago.

As far as your scenario that suggests a restrictive deal blocking traffic, Canada has a section of the Telecom Act (S. 36) that already prohibits this. 

There is no need for further regulation or binding net neutrality agreements. Sufficient law is already in place.

Then how is the throttling of Bit Torrent files legal? Roger’s has deals with various big media through their cable network, and Bell has BEV...and they are throttling their own competition, eg: CBC’s recent broadcast. Ultimately, Bit Torrent distribution of programs is a much better form of distribution than streaming.

I know many people who don’t watch TV any more except for the news, they download all of the shows they like to watch. They get nice, high resolution video, and no commercials. And they can play them any time they want. The only thing they sacrifice is getting them as soon as they are broadcast. I am sure that if the various networks released the shows on Bit Torrent, with commercials, allowing everyone to download them without threat of legal attacks, people would jump at it. Of course, this would piss off Rogers and Bell because they see themselves as Media companies.

But it could happen, and there are various models for this type of distribution could pay...subscribe to your favorite program directly, and you get access to a high capacity, high speed Bit Torrent server. DVD would sell because you would include scenes that were cut, as well as commentary and other extras.