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 began selling a "quality of service" add-on to optimize the use of third-party voice-over-Internet services. Also in 2006, the Telecom Policy Review Panel recommended that the Telecommunications Act be amended to "confirm the right of Canadian consumers to access publicly available Internet applications and content of their choice by means of all public telecommunications networks providing access to the Internet."
Notwithstanding these events, little policy guidance as to network neutrality has been forthcoming. A dispute now before the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) on the "throttling" of wholesale Internet access may provide such guidance. Most large high-speed Internet access providers in Canada cap their access plans, such that per-bit pricing is in effect above a monthly bandwidth threshold. Many have also implemented traffic management tools that affect their retail customers' use of peer-to-peer applications, which rely on large numbers of simultaneous Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) traffic sessions. In March 2008, Bell Canada, the country's largest Internet access provider, began applying the same traffic management tools to its Gateway Access Service (GAS).
GAS is a CRTC-mandated wholesale service, subject to CRTC-approved tariffs, used by ISPs to provide Internet access to customers in areas where the ISP has no facilities. GAS includes two elements: an access-segment data stream over ADSL, from the end user's premises to the pertinent Bell wire centre; and transit of that data stream from the end-user-adjacent wire centre to a Bell wire centre in which the ISP has a point-of-presence. A similar but more expensive service that offers a dedicated, non-IP Permanent Virtual Circuit (PVC) between the end user's premises and the remote wire centre is not subject to the dispute.
The Canadian Association of Internet Provider's (CAIP) complaint asked the CRTC to issue an interim and, subsequently, final order to require Bell to cease and desist from shaping, throttling, or choking its wholesale ADSL services, and to find that Bell's traffic-shaping infringes upon CRTC regulations and the Telecommunications Act. In May, 2008, the CRTC denied CAIP's application for interim relief, but initiated a public process to consider the matter more fully. A decision in the CAIP/Bell dispute is expected in the fall of 2008 — at which time the CRTC's New Media hearing, which will address network neutrality more broadly, will be underway.
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