Bandwidth lies and video streaming

I have the joy of living in a great forward thinking country with excellent amenities and pretty good access to services.  I love my country, I'm Canadian through and through.  I've gotta say though, like any one else, I get a little annoyed when my tax dollars get spent on utter stupidity.  For example, an arm's length regulator like the CRTC that has far exceeded its mandate and is trying to regulate things like whether Bell Canada can impose their bandwidth usage limits on third parties who access their system.  This has been in the media lately as Usage Based Billing.

First, we need to define the situation.  Many people don't understand how this works, so I'll try to explain.  High speed phone line internet service (ADSL/DSL) requires that your Internet provider (ISP) be able to communicate at very high speeds over your phone line.  This requires that they have equipment connected as physically close as possible to your home.

Since your local phone company owns the copper lines where you live (probably Bell), your Internet provider needs to work out an arrangement with them to offer you Internet service over those lines.  Now if Bell were just another company that had private property involved, this would all seem much more simple, but that's not the case.  Bell has over the years been given fantastic amounts of taxpayer money by the government to help them provide phone service to Canadians.  As a result of this government-granted monopoly on the service, they're required to allow third-party Internet providers to use those lines at a fair price.

As it stands however, the price Bell charges a third-party ISP is not fair.  And on top of that, with the recent request the CRTC granted, Bell gets to impose bandwidth limits on those ISPs who then end up having to pass them on to you.  Here's the rub: it costs Bell nothing to handle your Internet for that ISP.  Bell has equipment they're renting out to your Internet provider, and the Internet service itself is 100% handled by your ISP.  Bell's feelings about your Internet usage shouldn't be relevant at all.

I'm glad some in our government understand how unfair and incredibly biased the CRTC decision was and have vowed to overturn it.  If the CRTC is going to regulate anything with regards to Internet billing, maybe they should look at usage limits ISPs impose unfairly on consumers in the first place.  But that's another issue altogether.

Privacy while surfing

A Canadian judge recently ruled that police did not need a warrant to request the information on an Internet subscriber from an ISP based on their IP address. The judge said that one's actions on the Internet have no expectation of privacy.

Most people I know would be very unnerved to think their behaviour online is somehow public data, or that their surfing habits could be linked back to them with a simple unwarranted request. While the case in question was one of child pornography for which many would feel this action was justified, the judge's ruling did not take this into any consideration as far as I noticed and as such this warrantless personal data request may be repeated for any type of online investigation. I am not a lawyer mind you.

Some people have been asking what the difference is between an IP address and a physical address. Everyone should expect their phone number or address will lead back to their personal information via a simple reverse directory of course. As I said on a discussion about this story on Slashdot though,

One of the primary differences is that IP addresses are left behind as cookie crumbs everywhere you go online. In real life, you wouldn't leave your home address and telephone number on business cards laying on the street at every intersection with a date/time stamp indicating that you'd been there, would you?
While the type of information seems similar, the resulting availability of personal behaviour data that is discoverable as a result is unnerving.

While I feel that most peoples' behaviour on the Internet is reckless an that people should take their personal information more seriously (by using encryption on E-mails, anonymizing proxy servers, etc.), I think the very fact that people do not take this seriously is proof that there is, contrary to this judge's opinion, an expectation of privacy online, however unwarranted.