The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) which is the Canadian equivalent of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the United States has announced that they are adopting a light touch approach to Net Neutrality.  CRTC chairman Konrad von Finckenstein explained that their regulatory framework will foster the freedom to innovate for consumers, application provide, and Internet Service Providers (ISPs).

The new CRTC framework will require ISP transparency and all new network management schemes must give 30-day notice to retail customers and 60-day notice to wholesale customers.  The framework will permit either economic or technical solutions to manage traffic.  The CRTC expressed a preference for economic means e.g., usage caps and peak hour congestion pricing because the consumer would be empowered to control their own behavior.  Technical solutions e.g., traffic shaping should only be used as a last resort.  With regard to the management of wireless networks, the CRTC has no ruling at this time but announced their intention to review at a future date.

Digital Society has always maintained that economic and technical means are complementary to each other and serve different purposes.  Peak pricing mechanisms can mitigate excessive usage over the course of a few hours but does nothing to mitigate excessive usage over the course of a few seconds (a phenomenon called jitter) which can prevent real-time applications from working.  Furthermore, there is a universally fair way of prioritizing applications.

The CRTC appears to recognize the need to protect all interests on the Internet and it recognizes the need to permit a wide range of network management techniques from economic to technical.  The CRTC acknowledges the fact the wireless networks are significantly different from wired networks and that a different set of rules (if any) are required, and only after an extensive round of fact finding.