bittorrent

The CRTC has tried to address limited ISP competition by requiring companies such as Bell to provide access to third-party ISPs that "resell" Bell service with regulated wholesale prices that lead to a measure of increased competition.  Indeed, there are apparently about 100 companies that currently resell Bell access services.  Many have made substantial investments in their own networks and have loyal customer bases that number into the tens of thousands.

Those same companies have expressed concern to Bell about the possibility that it might institute throttling and thereby directly affect their services.  Until yesterday, Bell had sought to reassure the companies that this was not their plan. For example, in response to a question about network speeds to resellers, it told the CRTC in 2003 that:

the throughput will be determined by the customer's user network interface (UNI) access circuit capacity rather than the Peak Information Rate (PIR) setting.  Of course, Bell Canada reserves the right to implement a PIR rate in cases of troubleshooting or to protect the network infrastructure from congestion resulting from malfunctioning or mis-configured equipment or malicious hacking.

The new throttling system has nothing to do with troubleshooting, malfunctioning equipment, or malicious hacking, but rather involves speed limits for a particular class of traffic.  Moreover, for months Bell has been installing "deep packet inspection" capabilities into its network.  Sources advise that the company was regularly asked about its intentions and that it consistently assured ISPs that throttling would not apply to wholesale services. Now that the company has dropped that pretense, the business community is left to wonder whether it will soon target business VPN traffic or broadcasters like the CBC for their streamed traffic.  This represents a fundamental reshaping of the Internet in Canada as we pay (literally) for the dire lack of competition and independent ISPs gear up for likely legal challenges.  Regardless of those outcomes, it will become increasingly apparent that the regulators and politicians can no longer remain silent.  Nor should Canadians.

Indeed, the CBC's model comes from the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, which last month used BitTorrent to distribute "Nordkalotten 365," one of the country's most popular programs.  The experiment proved very successful, with tens of thousands of downloads at virtually no cost to the broadcaster.  Moreover, the European Union recently joined forces with leading broadcasters such as the BBC to launch P2P-Next, a new peer-to-peer research project.  The project, which involves an investment of tens of millions of dollars, hopes to advance current P2P technologies to create the "next-generation Internet television distribution system."

The move toward distribution without copy-protection - often referred to as DRM-free - is also increasingly the norm. Guinevere Orvis, one of the interactive producers on the CBC show, acknowledged last week that "DRM is dead, even if a lot of broadcasters don't realize it." Many in the music industry share that view, as all of the major international record labels have abandoned copy-protection for music downloads in the face of consumer criticism and interoperability concerns. Similarly, many of the world's largest book publishers have dropped DRM for their audiobooks, after finding that consumers simply weren't making unauthorized copies of electronic books without copy-protection.

While the CBC may succeed in paving a new path for content distribution in Canada, it is also placing the spotlight yet again on Canadian network management practices. Viewers around the world may welcome the use of BitTorrent, however, Canada's Internet service providers may be less enamoured by the development.   Companies such as Rogers have admitted that they actively limit the amount of bandwidth allocated for file swapping on BitTorrent.  Those practices - known as traffic shaping - may leave Canadians wondering why they are unable to swiftly download CBC content.  In fact, critics point to the anti-competitive effects of ISPs limiting access to new forms of video distribution, while actively offering consumers competing video services.  

The CBC's BitTorrent experiment represents an enlightened approach to content distribution that reduces costs and makes Canadian content readily available to a global audience.  It would be ironic if ISP network management practices ensured that viewers outside the country enjoyed better access to the program than the Canadian taxpayers who helped fund its creation.