Showdown: CRTC Vs. Rogers on Net Neutrality Enforcement

On Friday the CRTC released a letter to Rogers stating that the possibility of other games being affected by the ITMP misclassification bug maybe in fact against section 36 of the Telecommunications Act.  The CRTC stated:

In Telecom Regulatory Policy 2009-657, the Commission stated that when noticeable service degradation occurs to time-sensitive traffic, it amounts to controlling the content and influencing the meaning and purpose of the telecommunications in question. The Commission found that use of an ITMP resulting in the noticeable degradation of time-sensitive Internet traffic would require prior Commission approval under section 36 of the Telecommunications Act.

Commission staff notes that in its report entitled World of Warcraft Testing, dated 25 July 2011, Rogers indicated that it had implemented a “whitelisting” solution to resolve issues related to misclassification of this specific game. Based on information provided by Rogers’ 2 September 2011 letter, as noted above, Commission staff considers that Rogers’ ITMPs could potentially continue to misclassify time-sensitive traffic such as other online games and therefore this could be affecting those games. Commission staff considers that Rogers should address and resolve this misclassification problem.

Rogers has publicly stated that they already have a system in place which requires users to contact the ISP if they are having connection problems with games, and will be tabling this system with the CRTC rather than complying with the order.

Rogers said that they were "not aware of any problems with any other online games." and "will table the process that we already have in place to deal with these issues.”

Rogers current policy is to only deal with such issues on consumer complaint, rather than taking active steps to test their systems to ensure compliance with CRTC policy, and that gaming systems remain unaffected.  The CRTC seems to disagree that the current system Rogers has in place to ensure compliance with CRTC policy is good enough.  This coming week the CRTC plans on releasing a Telecom Bulletin to the ISPs on how to handle consumer complaints on net neutrality policy, and what the CRTC expects from ISPs as far as enforcement.   The CRTC stated on this coming weeks schedule:

Telecom information bulletin:

Internet traffic management practices – Guidelines for responding to complaints and enforcing framework compliance by Internet service providers

While Rogers is playing dumb to the issue, the CRTC looks to be ready to enforce its policies.  This will be the first public test of non-compliance with net neutrality policy the CRTC has had to deal with.  Question remains, does the CRTC have the power to enforce these policies.  Rogers seems to be ready to test this as well. Stay tuned, the next few weeks are going to be interesting.