A couple weeks ago, I said I was moving to summer schedule for blogging, saying that posts would be less frequent.
Nay, nay!
At the time, I forgot that we had the CRTC hearing examining internet traffic management practices and that led to a busy week of posting. And it isn’t as though we have had weather that draws me away from the webcasts.
I’ll take some time away from the keyboard. Just not yet.
Michael Hennessy has recently started blogging and he points to a blog post by Stephen Taylor that found that the CRTC amended its new media decision (Broadcasting Regulatory Policy CRTC 2009-329), excising a paragraph from the concurring opinion that was written by Commissioner Tim Denton.
Apparently, the following quote was removed:
The history of the regulation of speech in this country does not engender confidence that such powers will be used wisely. Canada has experienced several instances in recent times where regulatory commissions of another type and armed with a different mission have challenged the right to say controversial things. The struggles of Ezra Levant14, Mark Steyn15 and others have served as important warnings that regulatory authorities charged with combating racism, hatred, and other evils have consistently expanded their mandates, have abused their powers and eroded fundamental liberties. Wherever there is official orthodoxy, disagreement is heresy, and where there is heresy, there is usually an inquisition to root it out. After centuries ridding ourselves of thought control agencies, 20th century Canada re-invented them.
The original version was cited by Mark Steyn on his blog, who nominated Denton to head up the CHRC. Steyn also picked up the issue of the removal of the paragraph.
While one might wonder whether this paragraph should have ever been in a CRTC decision, the usual way the CRTC has amended an officially released document is to issue an amendment, erratum, correction – usually by means of a “dash” order – resulting in say, Broadcasting Regulatory Policy CRTC 2009-329-1.
The CRTC’s public hearing looking at internet traffic management practices wraps up today.
There are many who seem to believe that the internet needs specific regulations to accommodate its unique nature – many failing to acknowledge that the general protections of S.27 and S.36 of the Telecom Act provide sufficient legislative authority to the CRTC. On the other side of the argument are those who argue that additional specific regulations could restrict innovation in the continued evolution of the network.
The catalyst for this debate in Canada has been application specific network management. It seems to me that we have seen such management before.
Telephone companies have always developed network management techniques to deal with usage and applications that cause congestion. I’m talking about more than just peak load events, such as snow storms, political crises, etc.
The economics of the telecom industry has always been predicated on sharing a network. As an industry, we do our best to make people think that the network is always there waiting for them, but there are times that traditional phone networks run out of circuits. Not just Mother’s Day.
Think back to radio station contest lines – we had special “choke networks” set up that helped to prevent contests from jamming up the rest of the network.
This wasn’t discriminating against radio station applications – it was managing the finite resources to benefit the maximum number of customers. Could the industry have built more infrastructure to accommodate these contests? Not always – some contests were ill-behaved and consumed as much network as was made available.
Generally, when a radio station said that they would give away tickets to the 5th or 6th caller, when you get a busy signal and assume that it is too late, so you wouldn’t bother to try again. Every so often, a disc jockey would get creative. There was an AM station that had the number 8 figure into its branding. Their DJ offered tickets to every eighth caller, dinner and tickets to every eightieth caller and backstage passes to the 800th caller.
Talk about an ill-behaved application of the voice network. Callers who heard a busy signal tried over and over and over again causing massive congestion of the local network.
The mass calling network pushed these calls into a throttled portion of the telephone network. How is this any different from the treatment of file sharing applications in terms of application discrimination?
Most importantly, it is the responsibility of network engineering to balance the economics and performance of the network to give everyone a satisfactory experience.
Although the survey is not scientific, it is interesting that concern about the issue is so much more pronounced among the independent sector. Does this gives credence to the claims that network management is not a concern for most internet users?
Earlier today, a couple of us were talking about things people consider free that aren’t really free at all.
“Free drinks” at your all-inclusive vacation really means pre-paid drinks. “Free evenings and weekends” on your mobile phone means that you paid for those minutes as part of your calling plan.
Free services are a core business model for many internet companies.
Following up on my posting from a little over a week ago, Hal Niedzviecki has a review of Chris Anderson’s book in the Saturday Globe and Mail.
The review points out that there is always a cost to free.
This should be on the curriculum starting in kindergarten: Free isn’t free because, kiddies, in corporate North America there is no such thing as a free lunch. If there’s one flaw in this book, it’s that Anderson spends too little time addressing the social costs of this rapidly emerging free economy.
How do we reconcile the way we are paying for ad-supported services? What kinds of events could trigger a backlash against the willingness of so many to pay with intangible currencies such as personal privacy?
Brad Fox testified on Wednesday in front of the CRTC this week that his Sick Kids Couchathon was throttled by Bell last November.
Various news media have picked up the story, including Tech Media and CBC.
Why is this the first we have heard about it, more than 7 months after the event? What is the real story?
Even on his own blog and the official event blog, immediately following the event, Fox didn’t say anything about throttling or resets.
In fact, on the Couchathon website, he wrote:
In the fog of “the day after” I’m left with nothing but warm feelings, and cool memories
Exhaustion and fat fingers on an untested platform could have also come into play. The opening clip speaks about technical challenges experienced at the beginning.
Fox said that he was losing 2-300 people each time the server (uStream.tv) needed to be reset, representing about 5% of the audience – that puts the audience at about 5-6000 people. CBC says that the losses occurred between 3 and 4am, which means that people going to sleep could also explain the loss of viewers.
The telethon generated $5500.
While it is convenient to blame ISP traffic throttling, there are a lot of other potential points of failure, including the originating PC and the serving application.
As the Chairman stated on Wednesday in respect of other accusations of misdeeds:
If you have specific evidence, why don’t you use the provisions of the law? Why don’t you make a complaint under section 27(2) and say, here there is undue preference, there is predatory conduct, rather than here in a policy hearing?
Why was this week’s policy hearing the first time we have heard of this problem?
I don’t think we have seen enough evidence on this story.