CanCult.ca

I’ve got an opinion piece in the new Maisonneuve calling on the government to embrace net neutrality. When I started writing the column, nobody wanted to talk about net neutrality besides the NDP and SaveOurNet.ca. Now it’s quickly become a hot political issue, with town hall forums around the country focusing attention on it and the Liberals expressing their support for it as well.

Put simply, net neutrality demands that ISPs treat all information equally. No screening practices which privilege or suppress certain sites or services are allowed. Your neighbourhood blog is as readily available to you as Apple’s iTunes store.

Net neutrality favours you and me, the users of content, rather than the commercial producers and distributors of that content. Without net neutrality, our online experience would be vastly different: a handful of large corporations would control not only what we access but how we access it, which in turn would affect what gets produced. The stakes—technological innovation and free speech—couldn’t be higher.

But Canada’s ISPs have gradually been undermining net neutrality without most users even being aware of it. Our ISPs are notorious for bandwidth throttling: using software to inspect the content of customers’ data streams and, if customers are using file-sharing applications like BitTorrent that often place a heavy demand on the network, slowing their transmission speed.

Here’s the video of Liberal MP Marc Garneau calling for net neutrality in the House of Commons: