11
Dec

As a Canadian Rogers action is no surprise

Posted by Steven Hodson in Tuesday, December 11th 2007      

Rogers rewrites webpages From what is being said around the blogosphere you would think that this newest escapade by Rogers to inject their own code into that datastream you are receiving is something new and underhanded. Well this current method Rogers is using to mess with your internet traffic and usage might be new but the fact that they or any other Canadian ISP has been playing games with that Internet access we pay outrageous monthly amounts for isn’t new.

Bell; or as its ISP arm is known as - Sympatico, has been capping and shaping the traffic going through its pipes since the early days of dial-up. Whether they called it Customer Fairness Usage back in the early days when you could find yourself without access for using your access too much during the peak times to now where all email traffic has to go through their SMTP servers to questionable speed claims with their DSL speeds.

Even though in the big cities there might be a modicum of (cough) competition (cough) once you reach the outlying small towns you are typical down to two choices either Bell’s DSL service or whatever the cable company wants to rape you for. As it stand here in Canada right now they might not call it price fixing - because we all know that is against the law - but it might as well be as both the telco’s; large and small, and the cable companies consider Internet access as their private money printing machine.

On top of this while the U.S. debates the finer point of what net neutrality is here in Canada all the ISP’s do as they damn well please because when push comes to shove we as consumers have no real choices that provide us with fair and equitable services for a price that doesn’t cut very deep gouges into anyone’s monthly budget.

So while many of the American bloggers might be getting up in arms over Rogers recent action of rewriting the web pages in your browser to tell you that your are using too much of the services they are providing and to behave or you will get capped my only questions is why this hasn’t happened sooner. It’s not like we have a government that will stand up for the consumer or any single company that believes that the money they are being paid for highspeed unlimited access means just that.

As Mike Masnick at Techdirt says:

Most importantly, though, it shows how some ISPs feel about its position in the value stream. They feel that they are more important than the content and services you are using. This is what leads to all those network neutrality debates, where the ISPs forget that they’re providing just a pipe and think that they are the most important part of the process and have the right to change how everything else works.

The things is that while it is the Americans that seem most worried about this intrusion by the ISP just about every Canadian knows that chances are nothing at all is going to be done to protect the consumer from this type of thing continuing just as nothing will be done about the rampant traffic shaping that is going on.

After all with you consider that Rogers is one of the most powerful cable and telecommunication companies in Canada next to Bell and that Ted Rogers is equally Canadians getting screwed again powerful within the Canadian political scene. As for Bell, well it just hires lobbyists and makes huge donations to whichever political party that will control the country for the next four years.

If there is any way that the cable companies and telecommunication companies can screw the Canadian consumer they will, because no-one in power gives a shit past the last election. Besides where are we going to go - the competition?

Well that might be possible if there really was any such thing in this country.

Listening to: Plastyc Buddha - throwing stones in placid pool - A Traveller’s Delight

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    Brett Glass here; you probably remember me as an InfoWorld columnist from years past, but today I am (among other things) running an ISP. I've posted the following comment about Rogers and net neutrality on a couple of other blogs and think it's appropriate here too. Rogers may indeed not be a good provider, but it is not clear that what it is doing in this case violates the principles of network neutrality or in fact is bad at all.

    Network neutrality means not using one's control of the pipe to disadvantage competitive content or service providers. For example, if you're a cable company that offers VoIP, network neutrality means not blocking customers' use of other VoIP providers.

    Network neutrality does NOT mean that a provider can't "frame" pages (as do many providers -- especially those like Juno which provide inexpensive or free service) or send them informative messages via their browser.

    Let's step back and take a dispassionate look at what Rogers is really doing here. They need to get a message to a customer. Like any experienced ISP, they know that there's a good chance that e-mail won't be read in a timely way, if at all. (We, as an ISP, find that our customers constantly change their addresses -- often after revealing them online and exposing them to spammers -- without any notice, and often let the mailboxes that we give them fill up, unread, until they exceed their quotas and no more can be received.) The Windows Message Service once worked to send users messages, but only ran on Windows and is now routinely blocked because it's become an avenue for pop-up spam. Snail mail? Expensive and slow... and the whole point of the Internet is to do things faster and more efficiently than that. Give users an special program to display messages from the ISP? Users have too many things running in the background, cluttering their computers, already -- so no one could blame them if they didn't install it. (Also, many users won't install an application for fear of viruses, and alternative operating systems likely would not run the software.) Display a different page than the user requested? Perhaps, but that certainly comes much closer to "hijacking" than what Rogers is doing. Display a message in the user's browser window (where we know he or she is looking) along with the Web page, and let the user "dismiss" it as soon as it's noticed? Excellent idea. A wonderful, simple, unobtrusive, and (IMHO) elegant solution to the problem.

    Now comes Lauren Weinstein -- known for drawing attention to himself by sensationalizing tempests in a teapot -- who has never run an ISP but seems to like to dictate what they do. Lauren claims that the sky will fall if ISPs use this nearly ideal way of communicating with their customers.

    Contrary to the claims of Mr. Weinstein's "network neutrality squad" (who have expanded the definition of "network neutrality" to mean "ISPs not doing anything which we, as unappointed regulators, do not approve"), this means of communication does not violate copyrights. Why? First of all, the message from the ISP appears entirely above, and separate from, the content of the page in the browser window. It's not much different that displaying it in a different pane (which, by the way, the browser might also be able to do -- but this is better because it's less obtrusive and unlikely to fail for the lack of Javascript or distort the page below). The display can't be considered a derivative work, because no human is adding his own creative expression to someone else's creation. A machine -- which can't create copyrighted works or derivative ones -- is simply putting a message above the page in the same browser window.

    It isn't defacement, because the original page appears exactly as it was intended -- just farther down in the window. And it isn't "hijacking," because the user is still getting the page he or she requested.

    What's more, there's no way that it can be said to be "non-neutral." The proxy which inserts the message into the window doesn't know or care what content lies below. The screen capture in Weinstein's blog showed Google, but it just as easily could have been Yahoo!, or Myspace, or Slashdot. For the same reason, it can't be said to be an invasion of privacy, because the software isn't looking at the content of the page above which it is inserting the message.

    In short, to complain that this practice is somehow injurious to the author of the original page is akin to an author complaining that his book has been injured by being displayed in a shop window along with another book by someone he didn't like. (Sorry, sir, but the merchant is allowed to do that.)

    Nor is what Rogers is doing a violation of an ISP's "common carrier" obligations (even if they were considered to be common carriers, which under US law, at any rate, they are not). Common carriers have been injecting notices into communications streams since time immemorial ("Please deposit 50 cents for the next 3 minutes"). And television stations have been superimposing images on program content at least since the early 1960s, when (I'm dating myself here) Sandy Becker's "Max the burglar" dashed across the screen during kids' cartoon shows and the first caller to report his presence won a prize. (The game was called "Catch Max.") And in the US, Federal law -- in particular, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act -- protects ISPs from liability for content they retransmit whether or not they are considered to be common carriers.

    There are sure to be some folks -- perhaps people who are frustrated with their ISPs for other reasons -- who will take this as an opportunity to lash out at ISPs. But most customers, I think, will recognize this as a good and sensible way for a company to contact its customers. Our small ISP is looking into it. In fact, because the issue is being raised, we're adding authorization to do it to our Terms of Service, so that users will be put on notice that they might receive a message through their browsers one day. I suppose it's possible that a customer might dislike this mode of communication and go elsewhere, but I suspect that most of them will appreciate it. In the meantime, let's just say "no" to regulation of the Internet.

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