The Day the Interweb Died.

Today, in Canada, the CRTC, our governing body of all things communication, implemented a law requiring that Canadians pay a surcharge for every Gig of Internet Bandwidth used above an allotted amount.

Bullocks.

Shaw currently, and for the past few years, has advertised a limit of 60GB per month download cap on its regular high speed service - the thing was, it wasn't very well enforced. Only excessive users - we're talking, in the hundreds of Gigabytes - would get threatening phone calls from Shaw - which wouldn't really amount to anything anyways.

The thing is - besides this only being a legislated way for ISPs to steal more of our money, and the fact that this law was unquestionably lobbied for by these ISPs themselves, don't they have the right to charge what they want for the product they're selling? I mean - why should their service have to be UNLIMITED. After all, cell phone companies [see: Satan] charge users by-the-minute, so why shouldn't internet companies be able to charge by the Gigabyte?

I can only really think of three arguments - but they're valid ones :

The government does have the right, in our system, to regulate prices so that the consumers, and the companies, are not getting shafted - in other words, to make things fairly fair and competitive. It's just, well, in this case they're (the government) using this exact authority - except to benefit, and line the pockets of, the ISPs, and likely themselves.

My second argument, which actually has precedent in countries including Estonia, France, Finland, Greece, and Spain, is that internet is a basic human right. I know in Finland at least, people who can't otherwise afford a computer are actually given one - and is set up in their home - and everyone recieves free (if I remember correctly) high speed internet. wowzers. So internet should be accessable by nature, and therefore not be subjected to pro-corporate laws like these.

Lastly, putting a bottleneck on the internet will damage the economy. Thousands if not millions of businesses - Canadian businesses - run in part or entirely on the internet. Some of these businesses rely solely on the use of high amounts of bandwidth - Netflix for example - or maybe joe-blow who creates a video-based website, or publishes music for sale on iTunes. Literally everyone who uses the internet, now, will be subjected to having to think more critically about their internet use, and as a result, businesses and services like these - not to mention online gaming services - will suffer.

Sure, it's only $2/month per extra gigabyte we use, which is still cheaper than going out and renting that movie you'd use the bandwidth for, but Shaw and Telus really, really don't need more of our money.