Here’s what I wrote re Net Neutrality and Usage-Based Billing:
The public internet has provided a wonderful stimulus to the economic and cultural life of our country and the entire world. But that stimulus depends on its equal accessibility to all users including small innovators as well as large existing corporations. Net “throttling” and other practices of the infrastructure owners threaten that equality of access and provide them with unfair economic advantage.
The introduction of Usage-Based Billing eliminates the argument about a few heavy users overloading the system at the expense of others, and so also eliminates the case for “throttling” of certain traffic types as well. So I urge you to continue on the path of eliminating that practice entirely.
But in addition to throttling certain parts of the internet relative to others, there is also a risk that utility companies will throttle the public internet as a whole in favour of their own privtely controlled content.
So protection of the internet requires also that the bandwidth cost rate that is applied to public internet traffic does not exceed that aplied to CableTV and other private traffic controlled by the owners of the infrastructrure (who are licensed to use public space and radio bandwidth for its implementation).
People must be able to buy video (and other content) from independent producers for the same delivery cost as they get it from the TV networks.
Please make sure to address this aspect in your supervision of the industry and the CRTC.
Thank you,
sincerely
Alan Cooper