One Comment

1. Gary says:

   February 2, 2012 at 12:51 am

   Far from neutral
   Don’t get me started…

   Discrimination against residential vs business users:
   … only business subscribers get the privilege of unblocked ports and a usage policy that allows running servers such as those for personal websites or email.

   … and the business plans are the only way to get a static IP addresses, suitable for a DNS name to point to, even though it would cost nothing to provide the option (either a checkbox or 1 line of text).

   Discrimination against uploaders:
   … asymmetric download vs upload speeds, meaning you can only hope to be a consumer and putting the monopolies at an advantage since my download speeds are only as fast as my source’s upload speeds; my ISP will always be the fastest service, so why look elsewhere for my news? At minimum, I’ll stick to the “big” brand-name sites. They know best anyway…

   Of course, there are standard arguments for these, like:
   … “only businesses need to run mailservers, so why shouldn’t we block the ports that hackers and spammers use?”

   … and, only business need static addresses, so why shouldn’t we charge for the 1-line static DHCP mapping?

   … and, people download more than they upload, so why shouldn’t downloading be faster?

   These are all red-herrings to distract from the traffic discrimination and abuse of their monopoly positions to lock would-be competition up before it even gets started, and to prevent customers from communicating.

   The Internet was designed as a peer-based network that just carried bytes. Everyone was equal… For a couple of years, before people started accepting gradual compromises.

   Now you need a business plan to set up a website, so most entrepreneurs pay Rackspace or Amazon. (It wasn’t always like this.)

   Now you need a business plan to host your own email at a fixed address, so most people and even technically-savy people opt to put their privacy at risk and use web-based providers. (It wasn’t always like this.)

   The Internet is broken. It’s time for the CRTC to step up on neutrality. The Internet isn’t just a cable network.

   IPv6 solves some of these problems by allowing your whole home network to be on the “real” Internet again (not just behind a router; but you can hide them too, if you like the privacy), and you can have a fixed address if you like. This would do away with the need for business-tier plans (at least until they break it again…).

   Of course, none of the main ISPs are jumping at IPv6 because the “do nothing” alternative will lead to a highly-centralized and deeply-nested walled-in network that is closer to the broadcast model they like best.

   If they get what they want, we might even have a premium “pay per page” service to look forward to. Sounds fun.

   There was only supposed to be one Internet. That was the whole point…