Thanks for nothing, CRTC!

As an avid user of these so-called "interwebs", I behave as any normal consumer would - wanting more for less. When looking for a good broadband plan, I chose my provider - Teksavvy - because they offered as close to unlimited use as one could possibly get, at a knock-down price.

Despite it being very convenient for me, I couldn't help but feel the awkwardness of the situation. Bell customers, poor souls, slapped with an unforgiving cap and overcharged for the fun of it; meanwhile I could surf carefree,  with no cap through a provider who used Bell's network. This has, naturally, come to a crashing end with the recent CRTC ruling that gave Bell the right to charge its network users, including wholesale clients, based on usage rather than for mere bandwidth blocks.

Property be property, if you own the network you should have the right to charge for its use as you see fit. Yet forcing your competitors to charge the same as you do is lame policy. A lameness comparable to that of the standard excuse for such charges: "preserving capacity".

This argument reminds me of Senator Ted Stevens' "series of tubes" quote. Bell and Rogers' charges per gigabyte, both within and over caps, are stellar enough to send the marginal utility of every extra GB of  capacity through the roof. There's no excuse for not beefing up networks when there's demand. 

If large amounts of non-profitable data is the problem, the CRTC could - and should - have forced Bell to un-bundle its network capacity. A client's running of a business site, torrenting, video streaming, peer-to-peer exchange, browsing, internet radio or VoIP are significantly different classes of usage. Their intrinsic value to each and every consumer are vastly different.

Right now, Bell is forcing everyone to charge $X for "groceries", rather than $A for "apples", $B for "oranges" and $C for "meat". 

The CRTC could have done Canadians a service by forcing bandwidth providers to give consumers choice over what they want from their internet connection. Bell and Rogers could have cashed in on the new offerings, such as Netflix, by offering privileged or unlimited access by consumers to Netflix servers for streaming, maybe for a small extra fee. How hard can it be to set up a privileged VPN? 

"Dear user, do you like movies? For $5 a month, you can connect to NetFlix through our dedicated VPN network. Stream unlimited movies without worrying about your usage cap. Yours, Bell". 

So long to seeing that level of smartness.

After all, with usage is limited to 25 GB you'd gladly pay extra per movie to have that usage taken off your bill. If, as a movie fanatic, you couldn't care less about torrents and P2P, you would very well forfeit your right to use that kind of protocol for the privilege of unlimited streaming, or internet radio, or VoIP. 

Net neutrality tends to hurt suppliers, while blind proprietorship hurts consumers. When will someone get a bloody grip and use their brains for thinking?

The ruling by the CRTC is akin to using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut. You get a pulped walnut, a dent in your table and remain hungry.