While the U.S. Congress continues to debate the issue of Net neutrality, comments by the CEO of one Canadian network provider have raised the spectre of potential content fees north of the border.
Last October, Robert Depatie, president and CEO of Vidéotron, said in a telecom conference he would like content providers like Google and Vonage to pay for their expanding use of band- width on Videotron’s network.
In recent months, exploding demand for Internet bandwidth has forced a showdown between network providers and content providers.
Content providers argue that Net neutrality should be preserved and all Internet traffic should be treated equally. They believe allowing network providers to charge additional fees to content providers could create a multi-tiered Internet where traffic from content providers who pay network providers a premium receives better treatment.
Breaking Net neutrality and treating some traffic differently than other traffic is merely a way to implement a tax or “adversely influence the choices consumers have before them,” says Joe Parent, vice-president of marketing and business development for Vonage Canada.
“The people who are for Net neutrality believe that the network providers will, somehow, give priority to certain people who pay them more money,” says Brian Sharwood, an analyst with telecom consultancy Seaboard Group in Toronto.
“Therefore, they’ll try to extract money from the likes of Google and Yahoo! and YouTube and extract money from them to give them higher priority. Therefore, it creates an uneven Internet — that is really the main concern.”
Parent says Net neutrality is important because it’s also a consumer advocacy issue.
“If companies like Vonage don’t get involved and speak out, then what will happen is that will allow those people with the most to gain by violating principles of Net neutrality to be allowed to determine what rules that play into the market,” Parent says.
Network providers see things differently though.
They argue they’re having to foot the bill for the expensive network upgrades required to support increasingly bandwidth-hungry applications and would like to offset that expense by charging additional fees.
“I think what we’ll see is, depending on the type of client and the relative importance of the application to their business, there may be some ISPs who will be applying preference to certain types of data,” says Tom Copeland, chair of the Canadian association of Internet providers and president of eagle.ca.
“It will happen on a case-by-case basis. I think given the uproar we’ve seen in the past over certain providers giving preference to their own applications while degrading the performance of competitive applications, I don’t think we’ll see that come back.”
Copeland says that ISPs constantly having to buy more bandwidth for data-rich applications is unfair as a business model.
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