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In Test, Canadian ISP Splices Itself Into Google Homepage
By Sarah Lai Stirland EmailDecember 10, 2007 | 1:42:16 PMCategories: Network Neutrality
A screen shot posted to the web over the weekend seems to show that Canada's largest provider of high-speed internet access is exploring a controversial data substitution technique that lets it add its own content to the webpages customers visit.
Expect this development to become Exhibit A in the case for net neutrality legislation.
Rogersgoogle
Lauren Weinstein, a technology consultant in Los Angeles and a long-time Internet activist, posted a screen-shot of a Rogers-modified Google search page this past Saturday on his blog.
The screen shot, forwarded from "a concerned reader," shows a Rogers-Yahoo branded customer service message apparently on Google's home page.
The message informs the Rogers customer that they are approaching their data cap limit for the month, and provides them with a link to information on how they would be able to upgrade their account, among other things.
"Just brought to my attention today by a concerned reader who chose Google for his example, what you're looking at is reportedly an ongoing test by Rogers in Canada, scheduled for deployment to Rogers Internet customers next quarter," Weinstein wrote in his blog.
"This is what Net Neutrality is about -- it's not just making sure that data is handled in a competitive and non-discriminatory manner, but it's also that the data that's sent is the data that you get -- that the content is unmodified, not with messages that are woven into your data stream [from third parties]" he says in an interview.
Weinstein is a co-founder of a non-profit discussion and policy group called People for Internet Responsibility, the latest project of which is a new e-mail discussion group called the Net Neutrality Squad. The project's goal is to report on and discuss alleged incidents of discriminatory activity.
Update: Rogers vice president of communications Taanta Gupta confirmed that Rogers is experimenting with this technique as a way to communicate with its customers.
"We're trying different things, and we'll test customer response," she says.
Gupta says that the bandwidth limitations have been in place for some time now, and that the ISP currently doesn't have a standard customer notification procedure.
"This is useful information for the customer to have," she says.
Update II: There's dissent, both in the blogosphere, and in the comments below as to whether this incident really amounts to a violation of net neutrality or not.
* Cynthia Brumfield over at IP Democracy plays it down, and points to Verizon's redirection of mistyped Web addresses to its own co-branded Yahoo search page as a worse violation.
* Others note that this sort of practice has been going on for a long time in other forms, so what's the big deal?
* Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing sez: "The terrible Canadian ISP Rogers has reached a new low ..."
Image: via Lauren Weinstein's blog.
By Sarah Lai Stirland EmailDecember 10, 2007 | 1:42:16 PMCategories: Network Neutrality
A screen shot posted to the web over the weekend seems to show that Canada's largest provider of high-speed internet access is exploring a controversial data substitution technique that lets it add its own content to the webpages customers visit.
Expect this development to become Exhibit A in the case for net neutrality legislation.
Rogersgoogle
Lauren Weinstein, a technology consultant in Los Angeles and a long-time Internet activist, posted a screen-shot of a Rogers-modified Google search page this past Saturday on his blog.
The screen shot, forwarded from "a concerned reader," shows a Rogers-Yahoo branded customer service message apparently on Google's home page.
The message informs the Rogers customer that they are approaching their data cap limit for the month, and provides them with a link to information on how they would be able to upgrade their account, among other things.
"Just brought to my attention today by a concerned reader who chose Google for his example, what you're looking at is reportedly an ongoing test by Rogers in Canada, scheduled for deployment to Rogers Internet customers next quarter," Weinstein wrote in his blog.
"This is what Net Neutrality is about -- it's not just making sure that data is handled in a competitive and non-discriminatory manner, but it's also that the data that's sent is the data that you get -- that the content is unmodified, not with messages that are woven into your data stream [from third parties]" he says in an interview.
Weinstein is a co-founder of a non-profit discussion and policy group called People for Internet Responsibility, the latest project of which is a new e-mail discussion group called the Net Neutrality Squad. The project's goal is to report on and discuss alleged incidents of discriminatory activity.
Update: Rogers vice president of communications Taanta Gupta confirmed that Rogers is experimenting with this technique as a way to communicate with its customers.
"We're trying different things, and we'll test customer response," she says.
Gupta says that the bandwidth limitations have been in place for some time now, and that the ISP currently doesn't have a standard customer notification procedure.
"This is useful information for the customer to have," she says.
Update II: There's dissent, both in the blogosphere, and in the comments below as to whether this incident really amounts to a violation of net neutrality or not.
* Cynthia Brumfield over at IP Democracy plays it down, and points to Verizon's redirection of mistyped Web addresses to its own co-branded Yahoo search page as a worse violation.
* Others note that this sort of practice has been going on for a long time in other forms, so what's the big deal?
* Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing sez: "The terrible Canadian ISP Rogers has reached a new low ..."
Image: via Lauren Weinstein's blog.
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