The effort to overturn metered Internet decision points to widespread public discontent

Friends, this article is IMPORTANT! Not only will it hit you right in the pocketbook, but metering will hurt both underground innovation and small businesses alike! -Ed.

Published February 10, 2011 by Fish Griwkowsky in News & Views

The Internet is in serious structural and philosophical peril in Canada. Despite the delay of usage-based billing last week by Industry Minister Tony Clement, and even his statement that an apparently pointless new review by the CRTC on the subject of metered bandwidth will have no negative effect on consumers regardless of its outcome, the language being used by both telcoms like Bell and the CRTC itself should set be an absolute call to defences for anyone who goes online.

The idea of charging $4 per gig after an utterly arbitrarily decided amount — what the greedheads term “excess use” — has set off righteous protests across the country to the point some are accusing the Tories of taking political advantage of the situation. The way I see it, if they do the right thing here and stop the insatiable phone companies we all know and adore from monopoly/duopoly-fucking us even further, Harper is that much closer to getting my vote. You heard me.

Numerous independent estimates on the cost of delivering a gig of information ring in at about three cents, after all. And the excuse, used often by the $100 neckties, that bandwidth should be handled parallel to some sort of finite resource which goes away after it’s used is not only a complete misrepresentation, but ignores the fact resources which actually do vanish are one and all subsidized by the government due to their essential nature.

Well, the web is no longer some luxury used by fanboy outsiders, it’s the greatest communication device in human history. It is, in short, us. All its faults are in fact a perfect mirror of ourselves, our culture and, it goes without saying, sits as a juicy circulatory system for international commerce that the foreign telcoms would apparently like to limit within Canadians’ ability to internationally compete. In such a scenario, a globalized company with ample spare money could constantly access the web pages of its competitors, using their own bandwidth charges as a weapon to drive them off the Internet. That may sound ridiculous, but at $4/gig it wouldn’t take long.

Or consider Skype, which allows small businesses like my wife’s to communicate with her partners, no matter where they are on earth. Suddenly, after already paying for speed, we now have to worry about how much we talk to each other? We were supposed to be technologically past that, man. In fact, we are. But there’s no “competition” currently out there who is rallying against this model, as the CRTC is claiming. This is a big issue, rife with corporate fallacies revealing a set of double standards which as usual favour those making exorbitant profits. If bandwidth is so finite, why don’t I get a rebate if I don’t use all mine? Why can’t I elect to share my unused portion with my neighbour who streams TV?

And incidentally, why, in Canada, do we have such entrapping cell phone policies compared to other nations? You know the answers to these questions as surely as you know why the Gulf of Mexico is polluted and the housing market collapsed in the U.S. Because companies are jogging drunkenly on our graves before we’re even dead with little or no regulation, such as that which saved the Canadian banking system. I praise Tony Clement’s efforts, but have no faith in their legal survival — which is not to say underground innovation won’t find a way around this mess. But it will, as always, be named illegal and result in guilt-trip commercials with horrible guitar solos soundtracking them, claiming open source funds terrorism.

The most ridiculous part of all of this is — and I’ve been watching it professionally since 1998 — at the point where businesses have finally pulled their heads out of their asses, dropped the lawyers and created successful models for selling content online, this sort of chess move hits. I don’t think that’s a coincidence, actually. It follows the established pattern of primary industries suddenly jacking their prices during the dot com boom when they realized people were laying mountains of cash on San Francisco “content creators.” Bush’s brownout recession followed though, again, the Americans are not falling for this. But we were that close, March 1.

Go on and pretend this micro-monitoring won’t affect you, that it’s OK if our web billing comes to resemble fine-print cell phone contracts. But can you honestly believe limiting how much Canadians use the web to connect with each other and the rest of the world could possibly be a good thing?

About Stop The Meter
In October, Canadians were outraged by the news that the CRTC had decided to allow Bell and other big Internet service providers (ISPs) to impose new fees on independent ISPs – usage-based billing. Now every Internet user in Canada is likely to feel the sting of a less affordable Internet, and a less competitive Internet service market. Recognizing the importance of this issue, OpenMedia.ca launched the Stop The Meter campaign.

Since its inception, this multi-platform petition, based at http://www.StopTheMeter.ca and in French at http://openmedia.ca/compteur, become a record breaker and a game changer. Over 80,000 names have now been added to the website, Facebook, Twitter, and in print.

Past Press Releases about Internet Metering
See: http://openmedia.ca/press