Battle over Web democracy has begun
Province
TORONTO — The battle in the U.S. by major telecoms to control Web content has arrived in Canada with little fanfare — and it’s a fight that could forever change the Net as we know it.
It’s being waged over something called Net neutrality, dubbed the First Amendment of the Internet in the U.S. Net neutrality aims to ensure the public can view the smallest blogs just as easily as the largest corporate websites.
“Right now, the Internet is almost a perfect, universal democracy,” says Pippa Lawson, the executive director of the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Law Clinic. “The smallest bloggers can be accessed as easily and as quickly as the websites of major corporations.”
That could change drastically if telecommunications firms, including Bell and Telus, have their way. Following the lead of their U.S. counterparts such as Verizon and AT&T, Canadian telecoms are pushing to have more control over the web — and to make a lot more money doing so.
Industry Minister Maxime Bernier is poring over a report by the federally appointed Telecommunications Policy Review Panel that recommends changes to the Telecommunications Act, including replacing a clause on “unjust discrimination” that does little to either uphold the principles of Net neutrality or prevent it from being violated.
“Our position on network diversity/neutrality is that it should be determined by market forces, not regulation,” Jacqueline Michelis, a spokeswoman for Bell Canada.
In other words, says Lawson, the fight is on. “There’s a big push in Canada right now to allow those sort of discriminatory practices,” she says.
“The companies that own the pipes of the Internet — the telecom companies — haven’t liked sitting back and watching big content providers like Google and Yahoo make billions of dollars. They want a piece of the pie, and they want to be able to favour their own content or the content of the corporations that would pay them big money.”
Telecoms want to determine which sites load quickly or slowly and which don’t load at all — and, especially, to promote their own content, says Ben Scott of the U.S. media watchdog Free Press and SavetheInternet.com.
“If I’m Telus and I’ve just created my own Telus iTunes and I decide I want my Telus iTunes to work better than Apple’s, well, too bad for Apple,” says Scott from Washington, D.C.
“Essentially they set themselves up as gatekeepers and they say: ‘Well, we own the wires and instead of treating all bits alike in a non-discriminatory fashion, we’re going to set up special deals and if you have the money, you can pay us to make your websites go much faster. And you can pay us to set up an exclusive deal where your website goes very fast and your competitor’s doesn’t.’ “
That’s something big content providers such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are dead set against, arguing it will destroy the free and open nature of the Internet and also create a tiered, dollar-driven Net that favours the wealthiest corporations over everyone else.
“Telephone companies cannot tell consumers who they can call. Network operators should not dictate what people can do online,” Google’s Vint Cerf said.
© The Vancouver Province 2006
