Coalition Urges CRTC to Ban Internet Traffic Shaping

The Open Internet Coalition (OIC), which has more than 70 members including heavyweights such as Google, Amazon and Sony, has made a submission to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) regarding its internet traffic management practices review in which the OIC argues in favour of a strong form of net neutrality. The CRTC has scheduled a hearing starting July 6, 2009 to review ISP traffic management practices, and to determine whether these practices are consistent with the Telecommunications Act (Act). OIC is calling on the CRTC to prohibit content, protocol and application-specific traffic management under the provisions of the Act which prohibit unjust discrimination and control of content of by a telecommunications carrier. OIC argues that these practices are not narrowly tailored and are not the least restrictive means to address network congestion and that, as a result, they create an undue or unreasonable disadvantage to certain entities, in contravention of the Act. Rather, OIC argues that carriers must invest in faster and better networks and limit themselves to application-neutral traffic management practices that do not employ so-called deep-packet inspection to look at the content of communications. Such application-neutral practices include charging consumers based on their bandwidth utilization and throttling all the traffic of the heaviest users. For the OIC submission, see: http://www.crtc.gc.ca/public/partvii/2008/8646/c12_200815400/1029708.pdf For all submissions made to the CTRC regarding this review, visit: http://www.crtc.gc.ca/PartVII/eng/2008/8646/c12_200815400.htm For related commentary, visit: http://tinyurl.com/c9uszr Summary by: Tom Feather