I caught the closing session of Vidfest on Friday - a call to arms to defend net neutrality, entitled "Can I Have Your Attention Please? An Internet SOS", featuring Matt Thompson and Jason Roks.

For those who are new to this debate, net neutrality is about maintaining the openness and equity that underpin the success of the Internet, as opposed to the imposition of packet prioritization that the major ISPs are trying to engineer. Panel surfer/moderator, Kris Krug, played this video which does a nice job of getting to the heart of the matter, albeit from the US perspective. Matt gave several analogies of other networks that owe their success to the principle of network neutrality - the phone system and the electrical grid:

"Imagine", he said, "that you call your favourite nieghbourhood family-run pizza place to place an order and instead of being put straight through an autmated voice comes on to tell you that your phone provider has struck a deal with Dominos and that you can either be put immediately through to Dominos or wait five minutes to be connected to the place you're trying to reach. Or imagine that your electrical outlet will only allow you to plug in a General Electric toaster and not one made by Phillips."

Last summer I drafted the Green Party of Canada's platform statement on Free/Libre Open Source Software and Network Neutrality (see Bruce Byfield's article from Linux.com). Since then the federal NDP have also taken up the cause.

While the US has seen egregious actions on the part of many ISPs, the latest transgression in our own fair country is courtesy of Bell Canada, which has started throttling the traffic of smaller ISPs (claiming they must do this is the name of network congestion) while at the same time launching a Video On Demand service that uses MPEG2 compression! This is absolutely ludicrous - offering their new service in MPEG4 would result in a immediate ten-fold saving in bandwidth that would all but negate the need to throttle the traffic of 'competitors' for the forseeable future.

Ultimately this is the usual story - are we going to allow greedy corporations to dictate what we can and can't do with our Internet?

The session ended with Jason encouraging us to visit SaveOurNet.ca where a coalition is currently being built in keep the Net open and free in Canada. Visit now and sign up as an individual or organization.