SEX, BOMBS & BURGERS

Last week was a big week for net neutrality, with rulings coming down in both Canada and the United States. I've blogged about net neutrality and its importance before. If you still don't know know what it is, in a nutshell it's about keeping the internet free from interference by the companies who own the pipes it runs on. That said, I'm on CBC Radio's Spark program talking about it this week - I'm on around the 32:10 mark, just after Tim Berners-Lee, the fellow who invented the web, and his definition of net neutrality. (The program also has a cool bit about geoblocking and why we Canadians can't access websites like Hulu - check it out).

I got asked a few times last week what I thought about the different developments in Canada and the U.S. Basically, what happened is that Canada's regulator, the CRTC, issued a new set of rules that internet service providers have to follow. ISPs must first use "economic measures" to try and control congestion - in other words, they have to build more capacity into their networks or charge customers by how much they download. If those moves don't alleviate congestion, they can try "technical measures" such as traffic shaping and throttling. In any event, they have to be transparent in what they're doing and tell customers about it.

A day after the Canadian ruling, the CRTC's U.S. counterpart, the FCC, approved a process that will ultimately establish similar rules, probably by next summer. The FCC has proposed a bunch of rules and there will now be several months of lobbying from both ISPs and net neutrality advocates before there is a final framework.

So what do I think? Well, the FCC's proposed rules are considerably stronger than the CRTC's official rules - they prohibit ISPs from blocking any sort of legal traffic or content. The CRTC rules do too, sort of, but ISPs do get the "technical measures" out - if they can prove a particular application is harming their network, they can effectively cripple it.

Moreover, the intent behind the FCC's proposed rules is also much stronger - Barack Obama vowed to protect net neutrality during his election campaign, and he's got ties to big supporting companies like Google. In Canada, our government continues to be mum on the subject.

(On a related note - there is some disturbing news coming from my old colleague Jesse Brown, who hosts the Search Engine podcast for TVO. Last week, Jesse tweeted some highlights from an interview he did with CRTC chairman Konrad von Finckenstein, who admitted he hasn't seen any studies that have criticized Canada's broadband situation. That's pretty shocking. Jesse tells me his podcast will be up on Monday - I'll post a link to it here as soon as I see it.)

It'll be interesting to see whether this apparently strong political will for concrete rules in the U.S. will get watered down by lobbying over the next couple of months. Heck, even acknowledged computer illiterate John McCain has joined in on attacking the FCC's proposed rules.

Meanwhile, here in Canada we're going to go with that old cliche - only time will tell.

UPDATE: Here's the link to Jesse's interview with the CRTC chairman. Some great questions in there.