Guest post by Katherine Siddle, of the SLAIS LIBR 561 Information Policy class.

Paul Holden spoke on net neutrality issues in Canada at the BCLA’s information policy conference October 24. As a professional software engineer, Holden brings a technical perspective to this issue.

Holden defines net neutrality as the transmission of data on the internet without discrimination regarding content, destination, file type, application or protocols. Net neutrality ensures a “free” internet, where users can access, buy, do, and use almost anything they want. Since no task, user, or content is privileged above any other, the net is equitable (and therefore “neutral”).

Historically, net neutrality has been the norm in Canada. Service providers have lacked the technical ability to interfere with service, and as a result, Canada has no policies on net neutrality. However, Holden identified “creeping anti-neutral behaviors” sparked by providers’ desire to extract revenue from bandwidth services, and their newfound ability to restrict access.

Holden described two technical anti-neutral techniques:

1. Preferential treatment or traffic shaping

This approach has largely faded, as providers have had difficulty arguing in its favour.

2. Throttling (targeting data and limiting bandwidth)

Providers often argue in favour of using throttling to manage internet congestion (too many users using the network at the same time). However, Holden maintains that there are other ways of dealing with this problem.

Holden also offered two examples of anti-neutral behavior:

1. Comcast’s targeting of BitTorrent traffic in 2007.

2. Bell Canada’s “upstream throttling”

Holden warns that the results of a non-neutral network produces the same results as a censored network. A non-neutral networks is more dangerous, though, because arguments against throttling are harder to make and less established than arguments against censorship. Users, he warns, become casualties of service provider’s business models. A non-neutral internet may be a threat to our civil liberties and re-build the barriers to publishing and communications that the internet’ has previously lowered.

For more information on Net Neutrality (and suggestions for pro-neutral action) see www.saveournet.ca

Paul Holden is the Vice President of the BC Freedom of Information and Privacy Association (BC FIPA), a non-partisan, non-profit society. FIPA was established in 1991 to promote and defend freedom of information and privacy rights in Canada.

Guest post by Nicole Maunsell, of the SLAIS LIBR 561 Information Policy class.

It was a small group at our telecom policy discussion, as others were lured to the more flashy net neutrality and copyright discussions. At first we weren’t sure we’d have much to say. Turns out we were wrong about that: it’s more exciting than you think. No, really. I can’t tell you all the sexy details (part of our plan to make telecom policy more enticing), so I’ll focus on what I got out of the discussion as a SLAIS student.

We talked about how to raise awareness of the issues, and who might do it. Something as simple as monitoring the CRTC for consultation announcements could be done by one person who wouldn’t necessarily need to be an expert. Because experts in this area are really hard to find. It’s a big, intimidating topic, and as the students in our group reminded us, who has the time?

So the solution is building it into our already overloaded activities. What if advocacy work was taught as part of the core curriculum in library school? After all, we’re told over and over again that advocacy and social activism are reasons we should be proud of our chosen profession. One of our wishlist items that we came up with during the session was a Citizen’s Guide to telecom policy. We believe people would care about these issues if they understood how it affected them. The Citizen’s Guide would have a glossary, illustrative examples, tips on how to take action and an accompanying action plan with recommendations for how to tailor the messages for the vastly different audiences that telecom policy affects. Something like that might take quite awhile, but it could be done as a series of SLAIS professional experiences (library or archival work for course credit). That is, if no one’s willing to find the cash to pay someone to do it, which would be lovely.

It’s a big goal, but a necessary long-term one. In the meantime, anyone want to volunteer to monitor the CRTC and notify BCLA when they have public consultations on issues pertaining to telecom policy?

Guest Post by Emily Tufts of LIBR 561 Information Policy class.

Leslie Shade’s presentation on Telecommunications Policy in Canada echoed many of the insights offered by an article she co-authored in 2008, From the Right to Communicate to Consumer Right of Access.  Shade emphasizes a shift from perceiving individuals as citizens to viewing us as consumers.  This shift accompanies a general trend towards neo-liberalism and its attendant ideology of free markets and deregulation.  However, the rhetoric of competition and increased consumer choice serves only to obscure the reality – that the Canadian telecommunications industry is actually an oligopoly.  Free from competition and the constraints of government policy protecting the public good, Canadian telecom giants like Bell, Telus and Rogers can busy themselves developing profitable technological infrastructure at the expense of the more intangible, social infrastructure.

The concept of “Skimming the Crème” in Telecommunications is of particular concern in Canada, a vast country with a small and geographically dispersed population.  Shade’s presentation highlighted the telecom practice of delivering “Fiber to the Rich” in the form of broadband internet service to profitable zones, such as affluent neighbourhoods.  I see this idea extending to include not only a rich/poor digital divide, but also an important urban/rural divide.

According to Statistics Canada, in 2001 more than 6 million Canadians, 20% of our nation’s population, lived outside of urban centres. (Stats Canada, 2001)  This 20% of the population often live without access to high-speed internet connectivity.  Indeed, my own experience growing up in rural Ontario highlights this problem.  On a farm only 2 hours from Toronto, my family continues to rely on dial-up connectivity for their web access.  This discrepancy in service can be explained by the low profit margins in rural areas for Telecom providers.  With a sparse population of potential subscribers, and the high cost of installing cable infrastructure in remote and often rugged terrain, there is little impetus for providers to serve the Canadian hinterland.

The consequences for rural and northern citizens are numerous.  Firstly, citizens are limited professionally.  Telecommuting, virtual conferencing, and simply emailing attached files are constrained by limited broadband connectivity.  Secondly, our children, the future citizens and leaders of our nation, are limited educationally.  Northern and rural schools without high-speed connectivity cannot provide their students with access to the wealth of learning materials available on the web.  While the internet theoretically provides access to a world of information, without high-speed internet connections, students are still limited to what is available within the walls of their classrooms.  Finally, citizens are limited democratically.  Without the ability to access and share information, citizens cannot be informed and public debate around issues of importance is silenced.

The tendency to frame telecommunications policy in terms of industry and consumerism rather than in terms of democracy and citizenship is problematic.  The public interest, without the protection of government regulation and policy, is eroded by the profit motives of the telecom giants.  Without a strong and vocal lobby for universal broadband access across Canada, the telecommunications industry will continue to put profits before people.  In response to the problem of limited broadband connectivity, the Harper Conservatives have pledged to spend $500 million to bring high speed internet access to rural Canadians.  (CBC News Story) (Conservative Party Website) One wonders, though, whether the promise of universal high speed access by 2016 will be too late for Canadians.

Finland’s initiative to block access to child porn sites is also blocking over 1,000 legitimate websites — including one belonging to a vocal critic of Finnish censorship.

The initiative is the result of a law passed in 2006 to filter foreign sites containing child porn. Finland’s national police force maintains a secret list of sites that contain, or link to, content that they consider to be child porn. When they find a site, they add its IP address to their list — thus blocking, not only the offending site, but also any other sites on the same web server. (For more details, check out this excellent overview of the censorship process.)

“But that’s Finland,” you’re thinking. “Who cares about Finland?”

Alas, much the same thing happens in Canada. Project Cleanfeed manages a list of sites that it classifies as child porn. The list is kept secret from the general public, but the major Canadian ISPs — Shaw, Telus, Rogers, Bell, MTS Allstream, SaskTel, and Videotron — all use it to filter your Internet access.

There are all sorts of problems with the project. The group that manages Project Cleanfeed has a good reputation, but as Cory Doctorow has pointed out, secret lists are ripe for abuse. (Remember, the Finnish police are using a very similar process to block a vocal critic of their censorship practices.) There is an appeal process, but it’s overseen by the same organization that blocked the site in the first place, and you can’t appeal if you don’t know that your site is on the secret list.

The ISPs’ participation also sets a bad precedent, since it means that they are acting as monitors of site content, rather than as neutral common carriers. And if they’re already blocking some types of content, what’s to stop them from blocking other types of content? In fact, as I understand it, by violating their own neutrality, they may be legally liable for their failure to block other types of illegal or objectionable content. For those of us who support net neutrality, this is obviously of some concern.

(I wrote about Project Cleanfeed in more detail on my personal blog back in 2006, when the project first got underway.)

The provincial government’s internal Internet filter is affecting ordinary Internet users in Tahsis, a small community on Vancouver Island.

An attempt to visit a pornography site, for example, would return a red screen with a British Columbia logo and a “** WARNING **” message: “This connection has been refused. The Internet site you are attempting to access has been designated by a web classification service as containing material that contravenes the BC Government’s Internet usage policy.”

The warning linked to a page that said, “Users must not access Internet sites that might bring the public service into disrepute or harm government’s reputation, such as those that carry offensive material.”

The local ISP is blaming the problem on “crossed wires” somewhere. Apparently, the ISP’s Internet connection is routed through the government’s network (presumably because Tahsis got Internet access through a provincial government rural broadband initiative). The filter is being incorrectly applied somewhere along the way.

According to the article, the same problem once affected the nearby town of Woss. It took six months to get the filter removed.

Industry Canada has announced new rules for next year’s auction of portions of the radio spectrum. Highlights include:

• 38% of the auctioned spectrum will be reserved for new entrants — in other words, off-limits to the big three incumbent providers (Telus, Bell, and Rogers).
• The incumbents will also have to share their networks and cell phone towers at “reasonable” rates.

The new rules will certainly help to make the Canadian wireless market more competitive, which is a good thing for cell phone customers. That said, it’s hard to give a sophisticated response to the auction rules without taking a close look at the policy framework for the auction, which is a long, complex, and highly technical document. It’s worth noting, though, that the rules still leave 62% of the available spectrum available to the highest bidder — a situation that favors the incumbent providers.