OTTAWA – Two years after establishing guidelines on net neutrality, the CRTC has fallen short on its goal to protect users, writes Michael Geist, a University of Ottawa law professor who holds the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law.
Geist’s report, which also appeared Friday in the Toronto Star, says that after filing an access to information request and reviewing “hundreds of pages of documents”, he found “that virtually all major Canadian ISPs have been the target of complaints, but there have been few, if any, consequences arising from the complaints process. In fact, the CRTC has frequently dismissed complaints as being outside of the scope of the policy, lacking in evidence, or sided with Internet provider practices.”
Citing complaints against Rogers, Bell, Cogeco and others, Geist says that only one complaint has "led to a clear change in provider policy” – when ExaTEL, an Ontario-based Internet phone company, filed a complaint against satellite Internet provider Barrett Xplore (now Xplornet) in January 2010, the CRTC found it guilty of throttling of time sensitive traffic in violation of its guidelines.
Offered the opportunity to reply to the findings, the CRTC said that it has “limited tools to enforce its rules” under the current legislation. “New tools, such as AMPs (administrative monetary penalties) allow the Commission to be more effective in its enforcement activities, as we have demonstrated in the case of DNCL (the Do Not Call List) and the significant penalties that were recently imposed”, reads the Commission’s response.
(Ed note: CRTC chair Konrad von Finckenstein has been calling for the ability to assess monetary penalties for years but parliament has not addressed it. Without AMPs, there’s little the CRTC can do).
