Thursday, April 05, 2007

 

Net neutrality and consumers

In the US, since August 2005, the FCC has a set of 4 principles that define net neutrality issues as a series of consumer rights:
to encourage broadband deployment and preserve and promote the open and interconnected nature of public Internet:
  1. consumers are entitled to access the lawful Internet content of their choice;
  2. consumers are entitled to run applications and services of their choice, subject to the needs of law enforcement;
  3. consumers are entitled to connect their choice of legal devices that do not harm the network; and
  4. consumers are entitled to competition among network providers, application and service providers, and content providers.
On Wednesday, the Canadian Cabinet ordered the establishment of an independent consumer agency, what I have called C-5, Canadian Communications Consumer Complaint Commission. The federal government said that it believes that the mandate of the agency should include resolving complaints from individual and small business retail customers. C-5 would be an integral component of a deregulated telecommunications market.

Further, the CRTC is to begin annual reports to Cabinet on such issues. Its initial consumer complaints report is supposed to include
an identification of issues or trends that may warrant further attention by the Commission or by the government, such as the availability of consumer choice, the impact of marketing strategies and practices, consumer billing and contracts
Should net neutrality be framed in Canada as a consumer issue? Would or could this new consumer body be tasked with exploring net neutrality as an ex-post complaint centre, dealing with violations as they occur?

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Posted by Mark Goldberg @ 4/05/2007 07:49:00 AM
Comments:
Dealing with neutrality violations on a per-instance basis in inpractical. While there are people working on some applications, there is currently no good way to detect and prove a carrier is interfering unfairly.

I'd hate to see the c-5 get overwhelmed with bogus complaints about slow download speeds due to simply bad routing and not NN problems; but this is the most likely result of the lack of transparency.
Posted by Anonymous Anonymous : 10:54 AM, April 05, 2007
 
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