Mr. Speaker, I want to applaud the member for Oakville's initiative on bringing forward a motion to defend net neutrality, and it gives me great pride to be able to second this motion.

As has been noted a number of times already, the core concept of net neutrality already exists strongly in Canadian law without being specifically named. It is an important principle.

Net neutrality is a significantly bigger issue than limiting the speed of Netflix, and I am somebody who is quite sensitive to being asked to slow down. It is also a far broader discussion than we give it credit for. I will dive into all of that over the next few minutes and into next month.

At its core, net neutrality means that Internet service providers and the backbone providers that ISPs are connected to do not judge, limit, or control the content, speed, or nature of Internet traffic. Any packet, the basic unit of an Internet connection, coming in is relayed to its destination provided it meets basic security requirements. Net neutrality need not extend to blindly permitting distributed denial of service attacks, for example, nor the forwarding of packets with spoofed headers. Indeed, a DDoS is a third-party attack on neutrality by negatively affecting another service, but I digress.

The point is that if we take away net neutrality, what we take away is the network provider's obligation to pass on a packet without judging it. At its simplest, not having net neutrality means that any ISP can rate-limit, which means selectively slow down a bandwidth-intensive service like Netflix, without affecting the rest of the connection. That is how the big Internet service providers will sell this to us, as a fundamental question of fairness.

It sounds reasonable. Netflix alone represents about 35% of Internet traffic in North America today. It is not, of course, actually reasonable. If an ISP is not capable of sustaining the capacity it has sold someone, it has oversold it. I will come back to that the next time this is up for debate in a few weeks.

Unfortunately, this position by net neutrality-opposing ISPs means that providers are given the right to look at the traffic of individuals, a right they do not currently have except in aggregate. Once they have this right, this right also comes with obligations. ISPs, for example, will no longer be able to claim neutrality if a customer is looking at illegal content. Good, one might say, but no, not necessarily good, and here is why.

Once the ISPs are required to monitor the traffic of individuals, because without neutrality they become effectively required to, because they can no longer claim they could not should they be sued or charged and are also no longer required to be neutral about the transmission of this traffic, the door is wide open for ISPs to decide what we can and cannot do on the Internet. This then becomes a fundamental rights issue.

Without net neutrality, there is nothing stopping, for example, Bell Canada, the country's largest Internet provider, one of three roughly equally large-sized cellphone providers, and the plurality owner of Canada's domestic content creation market, from limiting people's Internet access on their Bell Canada connection or phone to Bell Canada content, which includes CTV news, The Movie Network, Crave TV, the sports network, and so forth, nor preventing them from accessing, say, CBC content. In fact, Bell already does this to an extent. People cannot watch Discovery channel online without a login to either a Bell service or a television provider that subscribes to it. It is clearly keen to have this power.

I am looking forward to finishing this in a few weeks.

David Graham

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