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Industry Minister Jim Prentice refused to be drawn into the simmering net neutrality debate yesterday, sidestepping questions about the government's stance on practices employed by Canadian Internet service providers that restrict the flow of certain types of Internet data.

NDP MP Charlie Angus raised the issue during question period in the House of Commons on Wednesday, asking the minister what the government was doing to monitor the debate over when it should be permissible for telecom companies to regulate or “shape” the flow of traffic on their networks.

“What steps will the Minister of Industry take to ensure that consumers who paid for access are not going to be ripped, that badly needed competition will not be squeezed off, and send a message to the telecom giants that they have no business monkey wrenching with the free flow of information?” he said.

Mr. Prentice said the government was monitoring the situation and waiting to see how the issue unfolds.

“We have a well advanced Internet system in this country. It is not publicly regulated,” he said.

“At this point in time we will continue to leave the matter between consumers on the one hand and Internet service providers on the other,” he said.

The debate over the unwritten code of net neutrality – advocates of which contend that all Internet traffic must be treated equally -- has been a hot button topic in the U.S. for more than a year, but has only recently become an issue in Ottawa.

On Friday, the National Union of Public and General Employees sent a letter to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) demanding that it investigate the impact of “traffic shaping” by ISPs on Canadian Internet users.

For more than a year, some of Canada's largest ISPs – including Bell Canada and Rogers Communications Inc. -- have employed “shaping” techniques, essentially slowing down certain kinds of Internet activity on their networks while giving priority to other data. Most of the data being shaped, or “throttled,” is peer-to-peer or “torrent” traffic, which is typically used to transmit large files, such as video files.

Last week it was revealed that Bell was in the process of rolling out plans to shape traffic on the networks it sells to third party Internet providers, in addition to its own throttling techniques. The announcement caused an uproar among many smaller, third party ISPs.

Mr. Angus said the government's “hands off” approach was bad news for Canada's innovation agenda.

“Net neutrality is the cornerstone of an innovative economy because it is the consumer and the innovator that needs to be in the driver's seat, not Ma Bell, not Rogers, not Vidéotron,” he said.

“They have no business deciding what information is in the fast lane or what information is in the slow lane,” he said.

Internet carriers argue that peer-to-peer and torrent traffic gobbles up large amounts of bandwidth, clogging their networks, and causing slow connection speeds for the majority of their customers. By throttling traffic, they are able to provide an optimal Internet experience for all customers, they say.

Estimates vary, but analysts believe this bandwidth-intensive applications account for as much as 90 per cent of Internet traffic and emanate from as few as 5 per cent of all users.