Back in July of 2009, the Canadian government launched an eight week public consultation on copyright reform.  Members of the public were invited to let their will be known surrounding issues such as fair use, copyright terms, ISP neutrality and a host of other issues. With over 8,300 respondents in total an astounding 6183 people made it known that they opposed another bill C-61 (a meager 54 respondents favoured the bill)

Bill C-61, of course, was the draconian U.S. DMCA-style copyright reform bill that former Industry Minister Jim Prentice introduced to parliament in June of 2008. The bill was ultimately abandoned when an election was called that fall, but has remained on the periphery since. The Conservatives have attempted to pass copyright reform three times without public consultation, bending to the will of industry lobbyists.

So, finally, the public has spoken and in near unison oppose the claustrophobic sanctions of bill C-61. Canadians, in fact, are a much more generous and trusting population than we could have guessed. The overwhelming majority support stronger fair use/fair dealing protection, shorter copyright terms, and believe individuals should be protected from liability for non-commercial use. Moreover, as popular as lightening copyright restrictions was, the opposite is equally equally true: only 153 respondents favour limiting or halting unauthorized filesharing and only one, one single respondent, supported fining those for copyright violation.

So what does this mean?  Essentially, Canadians are asking for the very opposite of what the government has been trying to pass for years. The question now is whether current Industry Minister Tony Clement is listening.

After the jump, the full results of the questionnaire, courtesy Michael Geist:

CRTC: making a tangled mess of broadband policy?

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission announced today new rules for how internet service providers are allowed to monitor, control, and throttle your internet access. After years of ponderous thought on the issue of how much control ISPs can wield over their customers’ web access, the CRTC has ceded the issue to the internet providers themselves, deciding that “transparency” is a suitable substitute for regulation. Now, with 30 days’ notice, ISPs get to set the rules and enforce them, and it’s up to the public to complain about oversteps and unfair consumer practices. With proven, repeat-offender oligopolists like Bell, Telus, and Rogers in charge, what could ever go wrong? Reports the CBC:

“It approves all of the throttling practices that ISPs currently engage in. It requires consumers to prove something funny is going on and consumers don’t have the means to figure out what ISPs are doing and they don’t have the resources to bring that to the commission’s attention,” said PIAC counsel John Lawford.

“There’s a lot of fine-grained double-speak here. There is no requirement for any of it.”

NDP digital issues spokesman Charlie Angus, who last year introduced a net neutrality private members bill to the House of Commons, also criticized the framework.

“Basically the CRTC has left the wolves in charge of the henhouse,” he said in a statement. “ISPs have been given the green light to shape the traffic on the internet toward their corporate interest. This decision is a huge blow to the future competitiveness of the internet.”

The real kick in the teeth is that the U.S. Federal Communications Commission is apparently poised to introduce a set of net-neutrality-positive laws into Congress as early as tomorrow, and last week two congressional reps introduced the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2009, which would catapult our neighbours to the south far ahead of Canada in terms of ensuring broadband availability and openness.

A map of internet traffic produced by the Opte Project. Licensed under Creative Commons.

For seven days in July, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission met in Gatineau, Quebec, to deliberate on the future of the Canadian internet. Until this summer, the CRTC took an essentially laissez-faire approach to the web: it was too new and too poorly understood to start carving out rules to govern it. But the World Wide Web turned 20 years old this year—about time to put away childish things and, in true twentysomething style, have a little identity crisis.

The CRTC commissioners slogged through plenty of arcane technical detail during the hearings, but the overarching issue was Net Neutrality: the principle that the networks we use to retrieve information treat all that information equally. When you look up a website, the phone company’s job is to deliver that website to your screen without regard to what it says, or in what format (text, audio, video). The network is neutral. In the same way, public streets are “neutral”: all cars have to follow the same rules—paying more for a Mercedes doesn’t entitle you to ignore stop signs.

On the internet, this egalitarian notion has been under sustained assault for years now by the telecommunications giants, frustrated that they haven’t yet perfected a way to bilk their internet customers to their satisfaction. Bell, Rogers, Shaw, and Telus, the cozy oligopoly that sells almost all internet access in Canada, claim they need to be able to discriminate between different types of data. All bits are not created equal, they say—text is easy to deliver, video is resource-intensive—so in order to make the network viable for everyone, they need to be able to block, throttle, or limit access for the heaviest users. Fair enough: resources aren’t infinite, so the need for some limited portion control is understandable.

But watchdog groups see a deeper problem here: Rogers, for instance, sells internet access and also owns TV stations and magazines. Why not privilege Rogers’ content on Rogers’ network? If that means slowing everyone else down a bit—say, access to This Magazine’s website will be slower—well, no hard feelings, it’s just synergy. Under such a scenario, small players will always be disadvantaged, lacking the cash and influence to pay off the network gatekeepers. And being able to block some information online implies the ability to inspect all information—a privacy nightmare.

The CRTC will reveal its findings and its next steps this fall. The technical details are complex, but the principles are simple: our lives—as friends, as consumers, as citizens—are increasingly lived online, and ensuring that our opportunities for communication are fair and equal is too important a task to leave to corporate interests for whom discrimination is more profitable. There is probably no easy solution to the net neutrality question. But there is a correct one.