TORONTO and OTTAWA – Law professor Michael Geist is standing by a blog post he wrote late last week claiming satellite Internet provider Barrett Xplore altered its Internet management policies after a complaint made to the CRTC under the Commission’s guidelines on net neutrality.
Geist, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa, also wrote in his blog that Barrett Xplore (now known as Xplornet) “was also the source of the longest running complaint as the company took months to respond to CRTC requests to improve its disclosure practices.” This prompted a tersely written statement from the Woodstock, NB-based company who said Tuesday that Geist’s post omitted "material information" and drew "incorrect conclusions regarding Barrett Xplore Inc.’s actions,” as Cartt.ca reported.
So we decided to dig a little deeper and ask Xplornet (Ed note: Mea culpa. It’s something we should have done in the first place).
“Perhaps in fairness to Mr. Geist he simply didn’t have access to all of the information and documents that went back and forth,” Xplornet’s chief legal officer, CJ Prudham, told Cartt.ca in an interview on Wednesday. “He certainly left the reader with the impression that we were unresponsive, and that we had to wait until the CRTC threatened us in order to clearly make a change in our policy, and that’s not really what happened.”
Prudham said the company was already in the process of revising its Internet traffic management practices to make them easier for customers to understand, before it, and a number of other Internet service providers (ISPs), were contacted by the Commission last fall. Xplornet uses four satellite platforms and associated gateways to offer Internet services in the country’s various time zones, a system that Prudham said is “exceptionally complex” to explain to customers.
When contacted by Cartt.ca, Geist described Xplornet’s Tuesday statement as “surprising” and “troubling”, noting that the article also mentioned complaints levied against Bell, Rogers and Cogeco.
“I certainly wasn’t looking to pick a fight with Xplornet,” Geist told Cartt.ca. “The piece that I did tried to be as comprehensive as possible, was really focussed on the CRTC, and highlighted complaints that have been launched against a large numbers of (Internet) providers. I put the spotlight on a whole bunch of them, so (Xplornet) certainly weren’t being singled out for anything.”
Geist’s post also detailed a complaint made by Ontario-based Internet phone company ExaTEL in January 2010 alleging that Barrett Xplore was degrading Internet telephony traffic and creating an unfair advantage for its own phone service. The CRTC determined that there was no undue preference, but did advise Barrett Xplore to either revise its throttling policies or apply for the Commission’s approval of the practice, as per section 36 of the Telecom Act.
“The problem was ExaTEL couldn’t identify which of our four satellites (was causing the slowdown) so there were a lot of technical discussions behind the scenes because each satellite works differently,” Prudham explained. “Without ExaTEL being able to tell us which satellite it was, it was a bit of a needle in the haystack technical thing that was going on as we tried to guess what the problem was in order to fix it. Even today we’re not sure that it was a traffic management issue because we never ultimately determined which platform it was on.”
Prudham acknowledged that discussions “took a fair amount of time”, and said that some correspondence from the CRTC went astray after being sent to Barrett Xplore’s old address, causing further delays. Geist questioned the relevance of these delays in his interview with Cartt.ca, and referenced a link in his post to a letter from the CRTC to Barrett Xplore dated April 29, 2011 detailing “repeated attempts” to obtain the company’s Internet traffic management practice disclosures. The letter also threatened to initiate a public process to “examine the matter in more detail.”
“I don’t think there’s anything inaccurate in what I’ve written, and I’ve posted all the CRTC documents that underline what I wrote”, Geist added. “I’m somewhat surprised to hear some of the claims they’re making now based on both the documentation that I posted and the documentation that I have that was not posted. There are those that may see it as somehow smearing my name or questioning the post. I think a retraction and an apology would be appropriate.”
Geist also included details about a complaint made against Bell Canada for allegedly throttling download speeds from Hotfile.com, an on-line locker service that lets users store and access music and other files from any computer. Bell declined Cartt.ca’s request to respond to Geist’s post.
Rogers Communications “has been the target of nearly half of all cases opened in response to net neutrality complaints”, according to Geist, especially about alleged bandwidth throttling of the popular multi-player online game World of Warcraft.
A Rogers spokesperson told Cartt.ca that the complaints to the CRTC “represent an extremely small fraction” of the company’s 1.7 million Internet customer base, but admitted that the company did find a “software problem” that has since been resolved which affected customers’ game play.
“As they are required to do, the CRTC has investigated,” wrote the spokesperson in an e-mail. “We are in full compliance with the CRTC rules and that is why the CRTC investigations have not resulted in any findings that we are out of compliance."
