Thanks to a new ruling by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, you might have to think twice about spending the next four hours playing FarmVille while streaming videos on the side. The CRTC– responding to a request by Bell– has allowed Usage Based Billing for Internet access in an attempt to offset the cost of heavy Internet users like yourself. In other words, you may soon start paying for any data you use above a certain unfortunately low cap.
The CRTC decided to accept Bell’s proposal for usage based billing on top of the access fees we’re familiar with and to force this change onto its competitors. Bell isn’t the only one doing this, they’re just the progenitor of the idea and the most obnoxiously limiting. Rogers and Shaw have both adopted UBB plans of their own.
Bell claims that UBB schemes fall under economic traffic management methods, which – in the interest of net neutrality– the CRTC correctly favours over technical methods. In other words, the CRTC acknowledges that it’s better to charge people more than to create a tiered Internet by artificially slowing certain types of Internet use. However, in this case, UBB doesn’t function to actively shape traffic at peak times or in anyway act as an incentive for heavy users to shift their usage times as Bell claims. It’s not a viable traffic management scheme in any relevant way. Bell’s response to the CRTC was to argue that unique peak period pricing wouldn’t be fair either, a stunningly obvious non-sequitur.
Bell’s UBB plans extend not just to their own customers. In the mystical land of Internet Service Providers, smaller companies often lease access to the infrastructure of larger ISPs. These third-party hosts must now pay into their own overages as Bell claims the providers would otherwise be unfairly paid for by UBB plans. These CRTC-induced fees force similar UBB plans onto third parties, effectively killing their ability to complete with their provider.
The services most affected are obviously those which require large amounts of data to be transferred. People who read the news and download the occasional song are probably not going to be affected yet. People who video chat, use internet telephony like Skype, stream video from YouTube or Netflix, buy digitally distributed games or listen to online radio could quite easily exceed the caps. But even if you’re not yet affected, it’s important to care. Many of these services directly compete against offerings from the exact companies which are trying to make them prohibitively expensive. Bell’s own television service seems like a better option if a $8 Netflix account incurs $60 in overages.
Bell’s current Essentials plan, according to their website, would allot users 1GB of data a month– about 10 minutes of low-quality video streaming a day. Their more expensive plans aren’t reasonable either, legally downloading a single video game through a service like Steam would use half the data available under the Performance plan. The cost of overages ranges rather significantly depending on provider and location. These charges can be as large as $2 per gigabyte, a ratio that rivals expensive storage used in high-end laptops.
There’s hope still, as earlier this week Prime Minister Stephen Harper tweeted that he had asked for a review of the CRTC decision. Expanding on Harper’s tweet, senior Conservative officals said “If they don’t reconsider we will reverse their decision” on Wednesday. Both the NDP and the Liberals have declared that they also oppose the decision.
If you, like many others, want to let it be known that you do not approve of this gouging, a quick Google search will point you towards the petitions and letter writing campaigns. And try not to get too distracted by kitten videos, you’ll end up paying for it.