Anyone who lives in Canada, is involved in the tech and internet industry, and has Rogers as their broadband access provider this news probably won’t come as any surprise.
It has been long rumored, sometimes proven, that Rogers Communication loves to screw with your access and charge you some premium prices for the privilege of being screwed by them so this news from the CRTC is more confirmation than anything else.
In a post today on Professor Michael Geist’s blog we find out that the CRTC (Canadian Radio and Telecommunication Commission) has sent Rogers a written notice that its investigation into the company’s practices has concluded and they have found that Rogers Communication violated Internet traffic management rules.
Based on the preliminary results of our ongoing investigation, Commission staff is of the belief that Rogers Communications Inc. (“Rogers”) applies a technical ITMP to unidentified traffic using default peer-to-peer (“P2P”) ports. On the basis of our evidence to date, any traffic from an unidentified time-sensitive application making use of P2P ports will be throttled resulting in noticeable degradation of such traffic.
Rogers has been given two weeks within which they can rebut the evidence or they must become compliant with the law.
This has caught more than a few tech watchers in Canada off-guard as this is really the first time that the CRTC has actually investigated a company and then enforce the net neutrality laws based on what they find.
I’m not holding my breath that this is a complete turn-around for the CRTC when it comes to dealing with companies like Rogers and the Internet but it sure would be nice to see.
