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SvennoJ on 22 November 2017
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DonFerrari said:
SvennoJ said:

Don't data caps take care of that already?
Here you can get 25 GB per month at 5 Mbps for CAD 33 a month, all the way up to unlimited at 1 Gbps for CAD 145 a month.

Except here ISPs tried favoring certain streaming services by not counting their data usage to your monthly usage rate. That was deemed unfair competition and cracked down on. Seems that only protects free market competition?

Data cap cover the quantity used... but if you can have also a choice on the services and pay less using less or more using more it even out and make people that focus their usage pay less in the end.

In Brazil we have very few ISPs because the regulation prevent competition so they say the neutrality protects the user.... but it protects more the interest of the few companies. Not sure how it goes over there.

But it really isn't much different than having a combo where the "unlimeted" or any higher plan is cheaper when bought with a streaming service.

How does the regulation prevent competition?

Here we already saw the effects of getting around net neutrality in the form of zero rating. A particular streaming service makes a deal with a particular isp to make their data not count to the data cap. Meanwhile the streaming service raises the price for everybody but promotes this deal with the particular isp. So other streaming services are disadvantaged and people using that streaming service on a different isp are disadvantaged as well. Wouldn't you say net neutrality protects the user in that case?

And consider this

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/04/as-us-prepares-to-gut-net-neutrality-rules-canada-strengthens-them/

I just wanted to add a bit of history here so that people understand why the CRTC cracks down so hard on net neutrality.

In 2005, workers for the telecommunications company Telus were on strike. Some of these workers set up a website that including discussions suggesting jamming Telus's phone lines and showed pictures of people who crossed the union picket lines. Note that whether or not you think that's a shitty thing to do, it was a legal thing to do.

Telus responded by completely blocking their subscribers from accessing that website.

In doing that, Telus (a major telecom here) violated net neutrality in the most spectacular way possible by blocking a website because they disagreed with the protected speech it was engaging in. That led the CRTC to start taking net neutrality very seriously, and it made opposition to that push virtually impossible by completely undermining the most frequently repeated argument against net neutrality ("we don't need it because nobody's violating it anyways") and demonstrating why it's important all in one fell swoop.