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During Question Period in the House of Commons yesterday, Charlie Angus (NDP MP for Timmins) questioned the Minister of Industry, Jim Prentice about the practice of throttling by some ISPs. Watch the video on Kevin McArthur’s great website “Mycelium“. Or read the transcript (see below) from the House Publications.

Jim Prentice says there is nothing he can do about throttling since the Internet is not publicly regulated. According to a colleague, Bell or Rogers subscribers should complain about ISP service to the Commissioner for Complaints for Telecommunications Services, since “this may be the only recourse for consumers who are being charged additionally for bandwidth, even as that bandwidth is being unfairly limited”.

In the meantime, Canadians for Democratic Media have set up an action alert “Stop the Throttler!”, where you can send a letter to Minister Prentice.

House of Commons Question Period transcript from April 2.

Mr. Charlie Angus (Timmins—James Bay, NDP):
Mr. Speaker, average Canadians are being ripped off by the telecom giants which are arbitrarily throttling information on the Internet. This is about a practice of a few large players being able to squeeze out smaller competition.

What steps will the Minister of Industry take to ensure that consumers who paid for access are not going to be ripped off, that badly needed competition will not be squeezed off, and send a message to the telecom giants that they have no business monkey wrenching with the free flow of information?

Hon. Jim Prentice (Minister of Industry, CPC):
Mr. Speaker, for the edification of my friend, the Internet is not regulated in Canada. We continue to monitor the discussion that is taking place, but there is no regulation of the relationship between Internet providers and consumers.

We will continue to see how the issue unfolds.

Mr. Charlie Angus (Timmins—James Bay, NDP):
Mr. Speaker, the minister’s hands-off approach to hands-on interference is bad news for the development of a Canadian innovation agenda. Net neutrality is the cornerstone of an innovative economy, because it is the consumer and the innovator who need to be in the driver’s seat, not Ma Bell, not Rogers, not Vidéotron. They have no business deciding what information is in the fast lane or what information is in the slow lane.

Will the minister come out of the Gestetner age and take action on the issue of net throttling?

Hon. Jim Prentice (Minister of Industry, CPC):
Mr. Speaker, I think virtually all members of the House could agree that if anyone inhabits the Gestetner age, it is the New Democratic Party. Members of that party would carry our country into the economic backwater that they propose.

We have a well advanced Internet system in this country. It is not publicly regulated. At this point in time we will continue to leave the matter between consumers on the one hand and Internet service providers on the other.

A colleague sent me a link to a story in American Libraries that says that the EPA National Library Network Report to Congress calls for the reopening of the four libraries that were closed back in 2006, that they will contain collections, that will be staffed by librarians that will offer reference services and that 1$ million will be spent on this. The report was published after the Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee of the House Science and Technology Committee’s hearing in which it was stated that “No library should be closed until its holdings have been effectively cataloged, evaluated, and digitized.” In February, a GAO report said that the EPA library closures were “hasty and ill-considered.”

Now if only something could be done to restore funding to our own Environment Canada libraries.

There has been some news in the Canadian blogosphere about Bell Canada’s introduction of traffic shapping (or throttling - “or the practice of shaping Internet traffic by selectively limiting bandwidth”). Essentially, Bell will be slowing down access in peak hours to P2P applications, like BitTorrent. This has affected legal uses of this technology, like downloading TV programmes from the CBC, which has chosen to experiment with this technology to offer their programming in a new way.

Michael Geist wrote a great post about the whole thing two days ago, and points to a Facebook group. The Council of Canadians has also set up an action alert, asking Canadians to write to the Minister of Industry, Jim Prentice.

This is another issue of Net Neutrality. Comcast in the US has been taken to task for doing the exact same thing. (They are now collaborating with BitTorrent - the company - to address more effectively issues of network management). The Canadian government and the CRTC should definitely be looking at setting up clear and enforceable rules to protect Net Neutrality.

The Briarpatch is an alternative news magazine based in Regina (circa 1973) making creative use of folkosomies and participatory metadata.

Their latest free monthly newsletter the B-List posted this effort to collect progressive/political news and links from their readers.

Are you an online news hound? Do you use del.icio.us to tag your favourite articles? Then you’ve got what it takes to become a B-List stringer! All you have to do is tag the best articles you can find (radical, insightful analyses of current events and important trends) with the tag briarpatchb-list. We’ll do the rest! If you want more info, just drop us a line.

-PC-

This tip arrived in my email today via the CLA distlist.

Facebook continues to gather your browing history … this link provides some info on how to block it.

Thanks to Toni Samek for the head’s up.

-PC-