This is happening precisely the way we expected it.
Bell announced this morning it has opened the online Bell Video Store , which will sell and rent movies and TV shows, and it has already run into an issue that has little to do with buying or renting videos.
The moment the news hit, the reactions were loud and immediate . And they hit on the conspiracy theme: How can Bell throttle, or shape, Internet traffic while making it easy to sell and download huge media files?
The main reason that Bell is using traffic-shaping technology is that many of its subscribers are using bandwidth-hungry applications such as BitTorrent to download huge files, most of them video or sound files. And when the traffic due to downloading gets heavy, Bell has to pay its backbone bandwidth supplier more.
This is a real problem. Traffic shaping is a legitimate issue.
But you can't throttle customers' use of the bandwidth while not shaping the traffic of your own downloads .
Why? Because putting the brakes on users' downloads, which are more than likely coming from some other source than Bell's Sympatico service, interferes with the way the market operates. The problem is that Bell is making it harder for people to buy movies from other sources while making it easier to buy from Bell.
There are restraint-of-trade laws that are created to stop this kind of nonsense. And if those laws can't stop this kind of behaviour, there is an army of people out there who are pushing hard to make such practices illegal. Lawmakers in the United States have trod warily around this issue, called “net neutrality,” but have expressed sympathy in principle that traffic-shaping technology should not be used to favour one vendor over another. In Canada, the CRTC is making similar noises .
And Bell can't argue, as I'm sure it will, that the technology it uses (from Extend Media) makes the situation different. The technology of choice doesn't matter. The bottom line is that Bell is using a technology, any technology, that will strongly influence its Sympatico subscribers to buy from Bell, and not other vendors.
With the opening of the Bell Video Store, Bell has opened the can of worms that is net neutrality in Canada. And those worms can't be herded back into the can easily.
