Rogers Communication and Bell Want You To Think They Own The Net
By dfred on March 29, 2008 - 2:41pm
Frederic says, "For your information, your ISP does not own the Internet. No one owns the Internet, and no single person or organization controls it. There are, however, organizations that oversee and standardize what’s going on the Internet and assign Internet Protocol addresses and domain names. The Internet Engineering Task Force, ICANN, InterNIC and the Internet Architecture Board are among these organizations.[...]ISP companies like Bell and Rogers charge a fee for the use of their servers that have access to the Internet, that’s all. They do not own the Internet. It’s certainly not Rogers Communication or Bell that have a right to charge fees to download content on the Internet."[ezvancouver - Vancouver Blog]
A lot of this problem can be traced back to a scheme last year in which the BBC in the UK
offered old programs from their TV network to computer users, with the proviso that first
you downloaded a little program from them onto your machine to facilitate all of that.
What they didn't tell you right up front was that this little program had a hidden and
always-running exe file called "Kservice.exe" from Kontiki, which in effect turned your
computer into a relay server for anyone else wanting to share those same BBC files.
This was all on a P2P (peer-to-peer) file-sharing format, and that hidden program caused
all kinds of problems, because (A) you didn't know about it (B) it ran constantly, and (C)
you couldn't get rid of it because you didn't know what to look for. That put a strain on the ISPs bandwidth resources, because suddenly, everyone who was into that P2P file-sharing was
increasing their bandwidth usage many times over, often quite unknowingly, because this wasn't properly explained to them beforehand.
Now, to bring this up to date, I see that the CBC is starting a similar P2P file-sharing
scheme, and quite possibly will create another situation similar to that in the UK last year,
wherein ISPs suddenly find their bandwidth usages going through the roof, without any real
necessity for that. This I suspect is what's behind all this recent throttling of usage of
bandwidth by those engaged in frequent and large downloads. A few hogs are ruining it for the rest of us. It makes sense to put a lid on that, don't you think?
Here's an article the explains the whole concept a bit better than I can:-
http://blogs.itworldcanada.com/insights/2008/03/29/separating-the-compet...