Bell has been using such traffic shaping techniques on its own network since last year, but in March 2008, it expanded its filtering to encompass resellers of its Internet service—even when those resellers explicitly offered neutral connections to subscribers.

The tactic has infuriated the community of small ISPs in Canada, most of which depend upon line-sharing provisions to stay in business. Bell’s action has removed one of the key ways in which the ISPs can differentiate themselves from Bell’s own service (price is the other big one). When news of the move leaked out, the Canadian Association of Internet Providers filed a complaint with the CRTC, Canada’s telecoms regulator, asking that Bell be forced to remove the filters from its wholesale service.

See the full article at:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080424-p2p-throttling-leading-to-net-neutrality-showdown-in-canada.html

Oh, and by the way: Mr. Payne’s comment above doesn’t actually address cost-shifting, which is an absolutely INDISPUTABLE propety of P2P. (Vuze, Inc. and BitTorrent, Inc. both stated this in their testimony.)

I just pushed a good 100gbs last week… regardless…

…I pay for my internet, I should be damned if I am told what I can and cannot do.

My internet doesn’t harbor terrorists, so whats the problem?

Sadly, that probably doesn’t help the matter in the US.

Not only are they messing up bit torrent business base, but they were blocking service that people paid for.

Isnt that the same thing as paying for cable and time warner purposely messing up FX just because they air shows that promote violence. I paid for all of basic cable not just the part you want to show me.

Just like I pay an isp provider for the internet, not just the little bits that might not have piracy.

Attacking bit torrent will do nothing but cause the pirates to shift to another distribution source. If they wish to stop it they will have to go to the countries that allow people to put up servers with the pirated material.

Consider this comment filed by George Ou on April 21, 2008 before the FCC on Broadband Practices, Docket 07-52, which attempts to characterize the impact of P2P use on broadband service.

“This would be like 10 passengers on a 100-seat airplane taking up 75 seats and forcing the other 90 passengers to share the remaining 25 seats. While it’s perfectly acceptable for 10 people to take 75 seats when there are only 25 other people on the plane who don’t mind using a single seat, it is outrageous when 90 passengers who paid just as much for their ticket as the 10 seat hogs who get ‘de prioritized’ in to 25 seats.”

Ou blames the passengers rather than the airline. In the analogy, the airline overbooked the flight, then allowed all the passengers on board under two conditions - one “acceptable” due to excess seating capacity with no congestion, the other “outrageous” due to a shortage - 100 seats “taken” by an excess of 165 total individual demands placed on only 100 available seats, which “bumps” 65 passengers into a “stand only” space.

Ou claims that like an airline passenger exceeding “ticket rights” to one seat by claiming multiple seats on a full flight, a bandwidth user exceeds “access rights” by occupying too many “bandwidth seats” too frequently which displaces other “rightful” users.

However, when the “P2P passengers” are placed in the correct context - on the outside of the plane in the waiting area at the gate terminal with all the other customers waiting to board the plane, or further back when the seats are reserved for the flight - Ou’s analogy fails.

From that perspective, the individual demands placed on available capacity for X seats at Y price arise from the same, neutral base and are the same across all passengers, i.e., seats are available on a neutral basis, and if the flight is overbooked, the excess demand is auctioned off on a neutral basis as well.

In this context, it’s not possible for the “P2P passengers” to “shift cost” onto other passengers. Individual seats are certainly not sold with the right to “steal adjacent seats at will” or “have stolen the seat sold.”

So why does Ou blame the equivalent of “bandwidth passengers” for “stealing bandwidth seats”?

What he means in part, is that because P2P use is based on simulatenous parallel streams of TCP allocated bandwidth, a single P2P user ends up occupying more “bandwidth seats” than were made advailable - but that’s no different than an overbooked flight in the short run or not enough airplanes over the long run.

As P2P users start using their “bandwidth seats” more often, broadband providers who failed to predict and accomodate the increased use - or chose to interrupt it instead - in effect, are like an airline carrier blaming certain customers for taking 20 flights a month instead of 5 and “shifting cost” to the other customers.

Nonsense. The airline is glad to have the additional business on a neutral, first-come, first-served basis under competitive conditions, which includes “neutral” access to first class seats and a wide variety of other neutral terms and condtions.

This is one more version of the mistaken “all you can eat bandwidth hog” label, which correctly phrased in this case, reverses to “we ran out of seating capacity because too many passengers showed up at the loading gate.” So? Whose problem is that?

If a “competitive” airline actually did what some broadband providers are doing - crammed too many passengers on the plane and then blamed them for stealing seats from each other after takeoff - there’d be some hard and fast net neutral solutions imposed in short order.