The Tyee, an independent on-line magazine based in BC wrote a story about net neutrality more than a year ago, noting that most Canadians are sleeping through the debate.
They followed up again last week.
Despite what is called a “perfect storm of events that may crystallize the issue for consumers, businesses, politicians, and regulators,” there hasn’t been an overwhelming outcry, despite extensive press coverage of the most recent network activities.
There are a number of voices who present a conspiracy theory on traffic shaping in Canada. They promote an Oliver Stone-type narrative trying to have you believe that traffic shaping is intended to help stop the unauthorized distribution of copyright material.
Canadians aren’t buying it.
Why?
I think it is simple. Traffic shaping is consumer friendly.
Network management protects customer service. For the vast majority of consumers, traffic shaping protects the overall quality of their internet experience.
Traffic shaping is designed to make sure that the most latency-demanding applications work properly. Voice over IP and network gaming – these applications just won’t work if the network is congested. If all bits are treated equally, then all applications get equally degraded when the network is jammed.
Traffic management is designed to make sure that there is capacity for the bits that absolutely, positively need to be delivered right away.
As to the conspiracy theory? Traffic shaping doesn’t care if file sharing traffic is legal content; that traffic is made to be a lower priority because it is, well, lower priority. Contrary to the ridiculous assertions to the contrary, there is no loss of utility of the file if it takes longer to download it. Once it is transfered, you have it and you view it locally in full living colour.
Rather than threaten the distribution of video content using streaming media, traffic shaping allows ISPs to protect capacity for such latency-demanding applications.
Some users want to load massive files onto their hard drives; perfectly legitimate, but lower priority traffic. Such traffic isn’t blocked, but during peak periods, it is capacity restricted to prevent it from tying up all of the network capacity. Why is it unreasonable to shift file transfers to off-peak times so that the majority of internet users can continue to play networked Xbox games or place their VoIP calls?
Maybe Canadians are sleeping through the net neutrality rhetoric because network traffic management is designed to benefit the majority of users. It’s democratic.
Freud said that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar – there is no hidden motivation. Traffic shaping isn’t a nefarious first step toward blocking content; maybe Canadians understand that network management is simply to manage traffic – there is no hidden intent.
Net neutrality will be the theme of a special session at The 2008 Canadian Telecom Summit on June 18.
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