CRTC consultation on Obligation to Serve

For what it’s worth, here is the main point I made in my submission today:

with regard to the question about ensuring access for all Canadians, I said:

CRTC should set national rate caps for broadband access via both telephone and cable operators AND should ensure ‘net neutrality’ with regard to content type and source. This does NOT preclude charging users on a per data quantity basis. In fact that is the best way to counter arguments for throttling, and is the only fair way to deal with the fact that some users ‘hog’ bandwidth. The most important fundamental principle to apply is that all transmitters via a given carrier should pay the same rate per unit of consumed bandwidth and similarly for recievers (with a difference between unit costs for transmitters and receivers being acceptable).


and with regard to the question about my own uses of the net (which included a list of common uses), I said:

All of the above. Especially education (both as a provider and a consumer), and business&entertainment (primarily as a consumer), but also (and perhaps most important) general access to information of all kinds.

This includes the above, as well as the health and directory instances mentioned in the expanded question – but it also includes news, location and direction finding, trivia searching, quote identifying, media fact checking, economic and political analysis and countless other things which would previously have required a trip to the library and hours of searching for much less chance of a successful result than I now have in minutes without leaving my home.

Since many items in the above list are required for informed political decision making, and since the providers of the necessary information are often NOT the major entertainment/media conglomerates, it is VITAL that access to ALL information providers be provided on an equal basis to all Canadians without any hint of bias and with complete transparency with regard to how different data sources are treated.

This brings me back to my emphasis in Q2 for the need for not just ‘net neutrality’ but for a guarantee that the present internet will receive the necessary resources and not be allowed to wither in favour of some ‘second tier’ network for the priveleged transmission of big media drivel and brainwashing.

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