Net Neutrality and Rogers
Michael Geist’s latest article in the Toronto Star talks about Roger’s traffic shaping, the unintended problems it creates (it may be causing slowdowns in corporate VPN traffic), and how it fits into the net neutrality debate.
Michael’s blog post also refers to some other views on the subject by Matt Roberts and Mark Evans. All three of those articles are a good read for anyone interested in the net neutrality debate, or how ISP’s control web traffic.
In essence, net neutrality (which I agree with by the way) is the idea that an ISP should not selectively degrade service to give one service provider better service to the user than another, whether that service provider is the ISP itself or someone else.
For example, an ISP should not degrade Vonage or Skype VOIP calls and ensure that the ISP’s own VOIP service gets priority or quality. Or the ISP should not degrade the VOIP traffic of all VOIP providers except the one that pays them for preferential service.
