The kind of applications we use on the network is a problem. But we are fast approaching a situation where network owner dictates which destinations we can visit and which ones we can’t.

To illustrate, let’s say you wanted to visit your aunt in Barrie, Ontario. But the gas station (owned by the oil company) decides they want to limit the number of people who can visit Barrie because they don’t like the town (or some other similarly arbitrary reason) and force you to pay 4 times more for gas. Would we accept this? I think not. Yet this is in fact the case with so-called “high speed” services. It’s called by various names “traffic shaping”, “bandwidth management” and so on.

What we need is grass-roots support (I’d say demand) for a broadband bill of rights that de-privatizes the infrastructure (and keeps it from being used by big corporations simply to make money).