Traffic Shaping Debate: CAIP v. Bell Canada

As in the US, Canadian high-speed Internet access markets are dominated by incumbent telecommunications and cable service providers, whose combined share of residential Internet access revenues reached 93% in 2006. Unlike in the US, network neutrality had not until recently arisen in Canada as a significant policy issue. That has now changed, following a dispute between independent ISPs and incumbent telco Bell Canada over traffic-shaping of wholesale Internet access.

Some discussion of network neutrality has taken place in the past. In 2005, an incumbent telco exercised its own notice-and-takedown procedures on an allegedly defamatory union website during a labour dispute. Also in 2005, the Privacy Commissioner denied a complaint alleging that an ISP's blocking of third-party outbound e-mail servers amounted to reading customers' e-mail. In 2006, a cableco selling its own voice-over-Internet service also