Union asks opposition leader to join net neutrality fight

The National Union of Public and General Employees (NUPGE) this week urged Liberal leader Stephane Dion and his party to take a stand in support of net neutrality. The letter caps off a feverish month of net neutrality debate in Canada that was initiated by the CBC's experiment with using BitTorrent to distribute television programming. "The National Union has become increasingly concerned about the threat to net neutrality and the failure of the Harper government to act to protect consumers and producers of Internet material," NUPGE president James Clancy wrote in his letter to Dion. "Past governments have made considerable investments into developing communications technologies, including the Internet. Our federal government needs to act to ensure the intention of this public investment is realized - an Internet that is open and accessible to all Canadians." As Canadian Communications Reports reported at the end of March, NUPGE formally asked the CRTC to investigate Internet traffic shaping (reducing download speeds for certain online applications like file sharing) by Canadian ISPs. The request coincided with CBC's decision to distribute episodes of the television series Canada's Next Great Prime Minister online using BitTorrent file-sharing software. After launching its experiment, CBC was inundated with customer complaints about how long it was taking to download the show, and bandwidth throttling was identified as the reason why. "It was quickly determined that the cause of the prolonged downloads and customer complaints was a new "traffic shaping" strategy Bell Canada had undertaken to manage what the phone company believed to be abusive Internet use," said the Canadian Association of Internet Providers (CAIP) earlier this month. In a March 28 letter to CAIP, Bell officially confirmed that it was using traffic shaping for data flowing to and from its wholesale ISP clients. On April 3, CAIP filed a Part VII Application asking the commission to direct Bell to cease and desist the activity. University of Ottawa law professor and noted open-access advocate Michael Geist called the CAIP application " the most significant legal development in the Canadian net neutrality debate yet, since it places the issue squarely before the commission." While CAIP was hoping the commission would expedite the process so Internet service levels could be returned to normal within 10 days, it has carried on for almost a month. This week CAIP issued its reply comments to the commission. "In our reply we have further demonstrated to the CRTC that Bell's activity is counter to regulations Bell is obliged to follow under the Telecommunication Act and that the anti competitive action is having a negative impact on our members and our customer," said CAIP chair Tom Copeland. CAIP adds that although Bell executives have maintained that they are throttling, or impeding, P2P traffic, tests by CAIP's members and Internet users at large have upheld CAIP's argument that other forms of traffic, including VoIP and VPNs, have become collateral damage. Though formal net-neutrality proceedings are relatively new in Canada, the debate has been ongoing in the US for sometime. NUPGE's Clancy was careful to point this out in his attempt to entice the Liberals to join the fight here. "Our American neighbours are taking this form of interference in Internet service very seriously. The Federal Communications Commission in the US is conducting an investigation into the blocking of legal peer-to-peer file sharing services by Comcast and other Internet service providers," he wrote. "On behalf of the 340,000 members of the National Union, I am asking the Liberal Party of Canada to take a clear stand in support of seeing the principle of net neutrality enshrined in Canadian law."

Union asks opposition leader to join net neutrality fight

News | 04/30/2008 1:58 pm EDT

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