Journal: News & Comment

Canada's government may not care about network discrimination

Permalinks to this entry: individual page or in monthly context. For more material from my journal, visit my home page or the archive.

Okay, Will, I hear you. Michael Geist has a good analysis of the Canadian government's current thinking (as elucidated in recent reports) about net neutrality—or, more accurately, data discrimination.

In Geist's words, the Canadian government seems to say that "we [the government] think blocking or prioritizing content may be acceptable, we recognize it is inconsistent with the recommendations of the Telecommunications Policy Review Panel, and we don't care because we plan to the leave the issue to the dominant telecommunications providers."

Those telecom providers have already shown that, given the chance, they won't play nice in maintaining the interoperability of the Internet that has made it a worldwide, massive success over the past decade and a half. One role of government in a free society is to protect its citizens, not just from physical threats, but also from those who might encroach on our freedom, physical or intellectual. And that's what we're talking about here.

 |