p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- “If you’re signed on with Bell-Sympatico and you’ve been unsuccessfully trying to coax a little more speed out of your suddenly sluggish computer; or, if you’ve been calling Bell-Sympatico support only to be told it’s not them, it’s you – it isn’t you,” said Ottawa Gal in 2007.

Because, “Bell-Sympatico is now following the Rogers lead. It’s traffic shaping and throttling.”

It was the first story on a scandal which eventually became a major issue and which, thanks to shameless stonewalling on the part of the CRTC, which is supposed to be adjudicating, has yet to be resolved.

And now another scandal is breaking.

Open to all persons

Bell Canada figures it has a license to mint money and as part of the process, is  forcefully penetrating its customers at both ends by double dipping their accounts, Ottawa Gal has just revealed.

She goes into chapter and verse in a post which sparked a number of comments, including one from Jen, a law student, who writes:

“We’re studying this since some of us were given desist notices and we find Bell and other internet providers have broken so many laws we don’t have enough of us to compile them all.”

She continues »»»

Each act and statute we look at we find Bell has broken it in some way.

The more we cross reference we find that every corporation has doing the same. It’s like the whole government, corporate and political entity has taken away the rights of Canadians and put them in a position of children where they can tell them what they should be doing and not telling them what the real truth is.

It’s mind boggling.

Look at laws that go back to start of Canada and you find that even present government is unlawful. It’s all a big money grab and legalized slavery.

It goes back to first settlers from England where the crown imposed shipping and maritime laws on first Canadians where it had no right to impose any laws on new land dwellers starting a new country.

[...] Anyone have Wayne Nagy’s email so we can give him pointers?

When Jen asks for Wayne’s email addie, she’s referring to another scandal highlighted in p2pnet, this time involving Rogers customer Wayne Nagy who’s suffered a whole load of unnecessary anguish because of Rogers Cable and BayTSP, a US company hired by the Lionsgate movie firm.

Wayne has been wrongly accused of downloading Lionsgate ‘product’ via his Rogers account.

Playing with peoples’ bandwidth

In the latest Bell debacle, in which Jen’s Reader’s Write appears, “if you’re the type to use, or come close to using, your allocated (you thought) bandwidth, there’s a good chance you’ve over-paid,” says Ottawa Gal.

Bell Canada is apparently playing with peoples’ bandwidth, failing to give them what they’re paying for, she says.

Could it be the execs running Bell Canada are thinking, ‘We can do whatever we want and no one in government will say a mumblin’word’?

If they are, they’re wrong.

And if Ding Dong or Rogers or Telus or anyone else thinks their customers are dumb cash cows who won’t say Moo, they’re wrong too.

It used to be that way, BTN (Before the Net). But in 2009 Bell, and anyone else who thinks their customers are mere ‘consumers,’ can be, and will be, held publicly and visibly accountable online.

They think things are bad now because of the recession?

Wait until even more of their customers dump them in favour of online services from smaller providers who care about the people who keep them in business instead of treating them like dirt.

They think they’ve killed the competition?

All they’ve done is boosted it by magnitudes.

‘You possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear’

In another Reader’s Write, Adam posts the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace mooted by John Perry Barlow, one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

It states »»»

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don’t exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract . This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.

Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.

Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge . Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.

In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.

You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.

In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.

Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.

These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

Davos, Switzerland

Stay tuned.

Jon Newton – p2pnet

January , 2009

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This entry was posted on Sunday, February 1st, 2009 at 4:51 pm 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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