Some observant users of certain Canadian ISPs (such as Wireless Nomad) made an unsettling discovery recently: it turns out the they are not receiving the full service that they thought they were paying for. While it is generally assumed by most people that the big Canadian Internet Service Providers such as Bell Canada, Rogers and Shaw use technology that throttles (or limits) BitTorrent and other P2P traffic, people who are connected through smaller ISPs were thought to be immune from reduction of service -- but this doesn't seem to be the case.

As it turns out, Bell Canada recently started throttling traffic of the bandwidth that it sells to these smaller, more independent ISPs, that in turn resell service to customers. This is particularly unsettling because some of these smaller ISPs are publicly against throttling, and have been unaware that they have been unknowingly short-changing their customers -- Bell Canada never informed the ISPs that they begun to filter and selectively limit their bandwidth. After this throttling was uncovered, Bell Canada did not deny it, and reportedly said that throttling for all ISPs will be in effect on April 7th.

Some ISPs have threatened to bring this case to the courts. It is particularly troubling because you can not really get Internet service without going through one of the big providers, so if those companies are limiting the resources that they give to independent resellers of Internet service, that it begs the question: who determines what entails the proper usage of Internet service? The Canadian government, or the handful of companies that control the distribution of Internet access?

Science fiction writer and DRM-fighting technology advocate Cory Doctorow seemed rather upset by the situation today on his blog, Biong Biong: "Bell Canada's position is that the Canadian Internet belongs to it, and that it has the right and duty to simply toss out packets based on which protocol they're running on, in order to maximize profits...Bell Canada's logic is that they should have the ability to reach into the stream of packets and secretly and discriminatorily chuck out packets that it has some prejudice against. This could be the beginning of the end of the Internet."

As pointed out by Ars Technica, Bell Canada's move to further disrupt and censor bandwidth comes just a few days after Canada's government funded television network, the CBC, has decided to take the innovative step of releasing its new reality show, Canada's Next Great Prime Minister, not only on through the airwares, but also through P2P networks.