p2pnet news | Freedom:- Canadian opposition leader Stéphane Dion should support the National Union of Public and General Employees (NUPGE) campaign for government action to protect Net neutrality in Canada, says the union.

“On behalf of the 340,000 members of the National Union, I am asking the Liberal Party of Canada to take a clear stand in support of seeing the principle of net neutrality enshrined in Canadian law,” NUPGE president James Clancy says on the union’s web site.

“The National Union has become increasingly concerned about the threat to net neutrality and the failure of the Harper government to act to protect consumers and producers of Internet material,” he says in a letter to Dion.

Traffic throttling and Net neutrality have become major topics of interest in Canada with the country’s largest ISP, Bell Canada, on the sharp end of growing discontent.

“The Internet promises a great deal of benefit to Canadians. Past governments have made considerable investments into developing communications technologies - including the Internet,” says Clancy. “Our federal government needs to act to ensure the intention of this public investment is realized - an Internet that is open and accessible to all Canadians.”

Bell Canada’s traffic shaping and revelations that Rogers is doing the same, “have quickly escalated the issue of net neutrality to a serious public concern,” he says, going on that Bell and Rogers aren’t the first cases in Canada of an ISP interfering with customer access to web content.

“The most notorious example is when Telus blocked access to the website of its striking workers (along with hundreds of other websites),” he said, referring the 2005 incident when the company blocked the Telecommunications Workers Union web site Voices For Change! during a dispute.

“Our American neighbours are taking this form of interference in Internet service very seriously,” says Clancy, adding:

“The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the United States is conducting an investigation into the blocking of legal peer-to-peer file sharing services by Comcast and other Internet service providers.”

. .Stumble It!

NUPGE - NUPGE asks federal Liberals to join net neutrality campaign, April 28, 2008
major topics - p2pnet traffic shaping digest, April 19, 2008
doing the same - Rogers ups the traffic throttling ante, April 30, 2008
2005 incident - Telus blocks hundreds of sites, August 3, 2005
conducting an investigation - Comcast throttling widespread, says FCC, April 23, 2008

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This entry was posted on Thursday, May 1st, 2008 at 5:45 am and is filed under Freedom, P2P. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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