Once again, the question of who owns the Internet has reared its head in the public sphere.
At the end of March, Rogers Cable announced that they will start to add a surcharge to the bills of broadband customers who are frequent downloaders.
Customers who use up a lot of bandwidth by downloading large files will be slapped with an additional monthly fee of $5 per extra gigabyte, up to a $25 maximum.
Bandwidth is the amount of data you can upload from or download to your computer within a specific time period.
Rogers currently has four levels of monthly usage allowance ranging from two gigabytes to 95 gigabytes.
But as Rogers explains on their website, virtually everything that you do online constitutes a
download, whether it’s streaming a video or opening your e-mail.
The vice-president of consumer services for Rogers Cable was quoted in the Globe and Mail explaining that the new fee “is simply about customers’ ability to exceed their usage allowance and pay for additional usage.”
But the cost of broadband Internet is not just the bandwidth usage but also the download speed. If paying more per month gets you a higher usage allowance, should it not also guarantee a faster, or at least a consistent, download speed?
Rogers and Bell Canada already use traffic-shaping policies which give priority connection speeds to certain types of usage.
For example, peer-to-peer downloading program users may experience slower connection speeds.
Bell has argued that the bandwidth-intensive applications slow down the flow of traffic for everyone else; therefore they are given a lower priority.
Third-party Internet service providers (ISPs) who basically rent space on the larger ISP infrastructure have had their
subscribers complain about experiencing slower connection speeds.
Individuals who look at a lot of news videos, for instance, could be caught by the new fees which are essentially punishing people who take advantage of peer-to-peer networks to download music and television shows.
These programs are routinely labelled as problematic when it comes to the flow of data and are the ones which see their service disrupted the most.
If all file-sharing were illegal, then perhaps the country’s large ISPs would have some clout in giving the programs less priority.
But more and more businesses are looking to the Internet as a way of reaching a broader audience through online television and other downloadable media.
Even the nation’s public broadcaster, the CBC, is getting in on the action with plans to distribute the upcoming installment of the television show “Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister” through BitTorrent.
The fact that programs such as BitTorrent, which were once known as dens of illicit pirating activity, are now being looked at as legitimate tools demonstrates a real paradigm shift in the online world.
The introduction of extra fees and these so-called “shaping” policies demonstrate that Canada’s largest ISPs are nowhere near being ready for this change.
Comcast, the second-largest ISP in the U.S., has said that it will end its own tiered-Internet setup and begin putting all online
material on equal footing by the end of the year.
In this instance, Canada should be taking lessons in equality from an American.