How To Make Canadians See Red

[amymyoung]

Originally published at Amy M. Young. Please leave any comments there.

It's bad when something can interrupt a planned post.

For non-Canadians (or non-secret-Canadians) the CRTC - Canadian Radio and Telecommunications Commission - is the body regulates all broadcasters and telecoms in Canada. It gives us the wonderful phrase of CanCon (Canadian Content - which must comprise at least 20-25% of all content shown/heard on Canada's airwaves) has just nicely slammed Canada back into the stone ages of the Internet with Usage Based Billing. 

What this means is that were other countries nicely get 200+GB caps, we now have a 25GB cap on our DSL, and a Netflix movie - which before was within this limit can easily put you over - costing, as one friend of mine averaged - about $20 for the movie, when it costs Bell Canada 7 CENTS (yes, 7 CENTS) to provide that bandwidth.

Some links for you:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/01/canada-gets-first-bitter-dose-of-metered-internet-billing.ars
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2010/05/06/crtc-usage-based-billing-internet.html

To speak out against this - http://openmedia.ca/meter