Information & Ethics committee  Providers are going to try to compete in a myriad different ways, and they do. Sometimes that involves bundling, and it's why, in the wireless space, some of the newest players have really struggled to establish the kind of market share that successive governments had hoped they would in terms of trying to inject more competition into the wireless space.

Information & Ethics committee  There are risks. I mentioned at least one that has already come up in the questions, which is that prospect of what happens when Canadian businesses try to compete in the U.S. market. At a consumer level, their direct interaction with their ISP should not face a non-net neutral approach.

Information & Ethics committee  That's a great question. That is a shortcoming of our system. The system at the moment requires individuals to file complaints with the CRTC. Many people who find that services might be running slowly or are unable to access something often will not have the technical wherewithal to try to identify precisely why that's taking place.

Information & Ethics committee  That's right. The concern is that the large ISPs will try to extract additional revenues, not necessarily from subscribers—

Information & Ethics committee  —but rather from the larger players. Although there is also, and I made brief reference to it, this notion of zero rating, the idea that you would offer certain content that would not count against the customer's data cap. The idea would be that this would create an incentive for subscribers to move to those.

Information & Ethics committee  Right.

Information & Ethics committee  It says you have to treat all content and applications in an equal, neutral fashion, regardless of where it originated.

Information & Ethics committee  I provided the video example, but we could take a real world commercial example, let's say, involving e-commerce sites. Everyone in the room, I'm sure, will be familiar with Shopify, one of Canada's most successful e-commerce platforms, and you have a lot of e-commerce companies running on that platform.

Information & Ethics committee  There too, I think, the concern is that we see today on the Internet this incredible diversity of content out there. It's always striking that the biggest proponents of net neutrality, especially among some of the successful Internet companies, weren't always big, successful Internet companies.

Information & Ethics committee  I think blocking would be the worst-case scenario, and as I've said, proposals are about to be put forward about content blocking agencies, so that worst-case scenario may become real relatively soon.

Information & Ethics committee  I think that ability to slow down does have an impact though, so I made reference, for example, to the very early case with deep packet inspection at the CRTC. At that point, a lot of people were using things like BitTorrent to access sometimes authorized content and sometimes unauthorized content by dramatically slowing down the ability to access some of that content, which you ultimately found was very tough to compete with.

Information & Ethics committee  Right. It certainly is about ensuring that the playing field is level. The concern isn't so much what a consumer pays for traffic. We all recognize, as consumers, that ISPs will sometimes charge different rates for different speeds. You can get unlimited service. You can get packages that have less than that.

Information & Ethics committee  That's the case on the consumer side. There has been considerable thought and certainly suggestions that this may happen, that the ISPs might like to offer different speeds to the people who are providing the content itself. Think, for example, of a video provider, say Netflix. Lots of people subscribe to Netflix.

Information & Ethics committee  Thanks very much. Good afternoon. As you heard, my name is Michael Geist. I'm a law professor at the University of Ottawa, where I hold the Canada research chair in Internet and e-commerce law. I'm also a member of the school's centre for law, technology, and society. My areas of specialty include digital policy and intellectual property and privacy.

International Trade committee  I want to quickly chime in, even on that last question about the regional side, and recognize that there are at least two sides to this coin. There is also a consumer side, especially in rural communities where they don't have some of the stores and where the amount of consumer choice might be far less than what is available in an urban community.