During the same week that President Obama pledged to bring broadband internet to every corner of the United States, America’s neighbors to the north were shocked to discover that usage-based internet billing, would be implemented in the spring this year by the CRTC (Canada's version of the FCC). This effectively hamstrings worry-free access to online and downloadable content for millions of Canadians, as well as limiting their ability to upload content for the rest of the world to enjoy.

In Canada, we're used to usage caps. If you purchase your internet service from one of the larger national companies--Bell, Rogers or Telus for example--you'll know that the majority of the plans they offer to consumers come with a data usage cap. In most cases, heavy bandwidth users who engage in P2P sharing or marathon-length online gaming sessions never sweat the amount of gigabytes they shift. This is because most of the caps employed by ISPs in this country are usually applied to economy-priced internet packages, aimed at casual users and feature slower download speeds. If you have the need for higher speeds, like gamers or those slinging files around the interwebz would, you'd have to invest in a more expensive tier of service that offered more bandwidth at higher speeds. Alternately, you could also seek out service from a smaller, provider as, in order to compete against larger national networks, many local ISPs offer unlimited internet packages for an insanely low monthly price. Unfortunately, due to the new billing regulations due to come into effect on March 1, the competitive playing field has been leveled.

Thanks to some clever lobbying by Canada's largest internet service providers, the bandwidth caps that had once been imposing on their lower-priced internet bundles as a way of upselling their customers, have in effect, become law. This means that every Canadian ISP will be forced to place a cap on their data plans, effectively removing any chance smaller companies have of being able to compete. 

Universal data caps also mean that every Canadian internet user, no matter what company or service bundle they subscribe to, run the risk of incurring additional costs should they exceed their monthly usage allowance. Many pundits feel that almost universally, companies will set their usage caps at a meager 20GB of up and down stream traffic per month. This doesn't bode well for the future of bandwidth-heavy services such as Apple's iTunes, online gaming, or Netflix, the latter being the biggest pity, as it hasn't really had a chance to come into its own yet.

Having only launched last fall, Canadians still don't enjoy the extensive movie library that Americans take for granted. Still, it’s our first, best taste of unlimited television and movies on demand. When paired with iTunes’ extensive library of movies, videos, and podcasts to fill in the gaps that Netflix can’t manage, there are fewer and fewer reasons to maintain a cable or satellite subscription. With this being the case, it's interesting to note that all of Canada's major internet service providers also have also have significant stakes in cable or satellite television delivery.

This my friends, is where the usage based billing metal meets the meat.

Let’s say that you’re a Team Fortress 2 and WoW junkie, who after blasting and slashing away your Saturday afternoon online, decides you’d like to download a movie from iTunes to watch with the family later in the evening. You’ve already tapped out your base internet usage cap after a half month’s worth of online gaming and Netflix streaming. That means that in order to download a flick from the iTunes store, you’re gonna incur additional download charges on your monthly internet bill. With per-byte fees set by the CRTC at $1.90 per GB, downloading a new release HD movie from iTunes will cost you $32.59—$24.99 for the movie (we pay more up here), and then an additional $7.90 to cover the 4 GB download. While your ISP won't be able to help you with the high cost of the download, they might try to persuade you towards using their company’s movies on-demand service: Available to all of their television subscribers who opt for one of their high-end bundles and rent an HD video set top box from them.

Get the picture? Good. So do a whole lot of Canadians. Usage-based billing isn't anything but a money grab. It will, by virtue of the extra costs associated with exceeding the cap, limit the amount of online access Canadians have with the rest of the world. It will also  limit how much access the world will have with Canada, as Canadians who want to upload films, share their research or use the internet to make their living will all be subject to the same usage caps and overage prices. This means that Canadian artists, scholars and business all suffer as a result.

In the past few weeks, an online movement against the new regulations has been growing, with one petition demanding the new regulations that had a measly 30,000 signatures to over 300,000 in under seven days. The Canadian government is all over this one as well, and has sworn that if the new regulations are not reversed by the CRTC, they will intervene on behalf of the Canadian people. As this story was written, the head of the CRTC was in meeting with the Canadian government's Standing Committee on Industry. The meeting was called as part of the Canadian government's investigation into the new billing regulations. With any luck, the country's parliament will stick to their guns and overturn the CRTC's decision to implement usage based billing. We'll just have to wait and see.

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