clearly its time to reconsider how intrinsic this infrastructure is to our society. Its beginning to feel like one or two private corporations own all the roads in Canada. To complete the metaphor, they only let people drive on half of the available lanes, and pack the cars tighter in order to maximize profits. Now they want to convert a few of the available lanes into slow lanes, and that way pack the rest of the cars even tighter. building more lanes or simply opening the ones that are mothballed in order to relieve congestion isn’t even part of the discussion.

we could just face reality and recognize this is now an essential service, but we don’t have the moral courage to do the obvious and nationalize just yet, and given our quaint economic dispositions, we’ll probably settle for regulating all sorts of complicated and corrupt pseudo-market systems, and do our somewhat best to introduce sorta-competition.

But pretty soon its going to look pretty silly having the short term profit concerns of a couple of companies choke the economy and hold the rest of the market hostage. Anyway, these companies are needlessly alienating people for marginal gains and what may be remembered as a heroic, but misguided and hopeless assault on online video content. fairly foolish given the context.

ultimately, its a cry for help from companies that are squeamish with the idea of a world where cabling “to your house” and archaic “tv” type push media are irrelevant. the whole p2p etc nonsense is just a backdrop with which to create the required precedent to charge for traffic at different speeds. Once a slow lane is made, you can imagine a fast lane is soon to follow. once client side cabling is irrelevant, this may represent the only form of income and control they can hope for. in short, the antithesis of net neutrality is the long term business plan.

ENOUGH!

imagine if you electrical company charged you more per kilowatt for electricity that powered your third-party oven than for electricity that powers a device that is branded by them.

that is the conflict that arises out of Rogers owning both content (ie television channels) and the service (physical cable tv lines).

they could, and likely will, charge more for content provided over the internet that competes with their television offerings.

“bandwidth” not “bandwith” lmao. Nice spelling lesson your passing out there. Might wanna STFU from now on.

As for you Dude & Dudette, should you not be outside playing with your children rather than hypocritically slamming technology. Oh sorry, you are probably dogging it, surfing, and wasting your employer’s money at the office.

Please don’t feed the trolls =D

The plan is to harrass their internet customers and run traffic shaping to save the expense of a required expansion they would need so their network can handle VOIP alongside their regular traffic running at normal speeds.

Does Bell Canada have the right to cut into a phone call to let us know we’re behind on our telephone bill?

Rogers is pushing the envelope with this by dressing a wolf in sheep’s clothing, just as Bell Canada with its tightening of the pipes under the guise of “network management”. This is how our freedoms are eroded. Slowly, establishing acceptance and precedent. Do not be mistaken, this is indeed the sacred cow of Net Neutrality being slaughtered. One porterhouse at a time.

..to all points. Here’s another….spell check has taken away correct spelling. Everywhere I go , no matter what position in society or high up on the ladder……PEOPLE CAN’T SPELL. (look at some of the above letters)
And society is worried about bandwith……….at least we could spell it in our era.
Peace

I remember a time when we only had 3 tv channels, - news came from kindly old gentleman with an authoritative voice at 6pm and lasted half an hour - dads were the bread winners, mail and milk were delivered to your door, not some box down the block, kids played real games outside(we were not allowed inside if it was light out), and the ever present threat of the world being blown to bits by a nuclear bomb launched by our arch enemy the commies, made life seem real —

Big Brother was a “possible” future written about in the book 1984 - (yes people actually read back then too)

whats my point?

We’ve become too dependent on this internet “pass time”! We’re at the point where most people think its a right - not a privilege - to be online. Personally I think we’ve become lazy and spoiled - we’ve let so many others do the thinking for us for so long that we now have less control over our lives than at any other time in our history. Sure the internet provides an abundance of information, but its overwhelmingly used for watching movies, stealing intellectual property and playing games until 3am and the biggest use of all - PORN. — Instead of empowering people - it’s put them to sleep. Instead of enriching our lives, it’s made us fat. Instead of creating child geniuses, it has instilled and re-enforced the need of instant gratification.

- if everyone was to get the hell outside and do something other than “PLAY” on computers, maybe the MONSTERS that run internet access in CANADA wouldn’t be so damn powerful. Guard yourself against complacency - take a walk and clear your head

Lets all get off our asses and do something real for a change

I never use the internet at home anymore, email is about the extent or msn.

when this story first broke several months ago, Google was up in arms because they were the first site that Rogers said they would place banner ads onto. Rogers should not be allowed to place their content on top of the content actually desired by the user.

additionally, the deep packet inspection used to determine what kind of data is sent by end users, and then throttling by type is the real concern.

Net Neutrality is the belief that all content on the internet should be treated equally. A service provider such as Rogers should not be allowed to provide one type of content over another.

the equivalent, would be the national postal service opening your mail, and deciding how fast they want to deliver it, or, whether they want to deliver it at all, purely based on the content of the package. additionally, using this example, the postal service could then decide that if you want this content, you must pay EXTRA, simply because they have decided that this will be the case.

the ongoing concerns are that service providers will engage in deals with content providers to limit or exclude the transmission of information.

and, let me tell you, I know first hand that this is already happening.