This is actually pretty old news. Traffic shaping has been occurring in Canada for years. Rogers was first in, but most other ISPs have been rolling it out ever since then.
I think there are still a number of battles to come. When bit-torrent started encrypting its traffic to avoid the throttling, Rogers started throttling all encrypted traffic so even encrypted mail traffic and so on that crossed Rogers were being affected.
This hearing that is being reported is actually the result of hearing that was CAIP v Bell.
In CAIP v Bell, CAIP (a small ISP who buys their bandwidth from Bell) complained that their traffic was being throttled by Bell in violation of the act that specifies that Bell must sell bandwidth to resellers. Last month the CRTC ruled that Bell had not violated their act.
Bell responded by saying:
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With this decision, the Commission has rightly confirmed that network operators are in the best position to determine how to operate their networks effectively and efficiently, to allow fair and proportionate use of the Internet by all users.
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As soon as the CRTC heard that, they begged to differ:
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Someone told me Bell put out a press release that said the commission upheld its position that network management practices are a fundamental right of theirs. That's not what we said at all.
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(per M. Geist
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/3531/125/)
What the CRTC had said was that Bell wasn't being anti-competitive with its throttling. CAIP was being throttled no more than Bell was throttling its own customers. As far as whether throttling should be allowed in the first place or not, the CRTC is currently investigating (
http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/archive/2008/pt2008-19.htm) and this news is from part of that investigation. There is a blog with a list of the questions the CRTC has asked the ISPs, and some of the responses (many of the responses have been flagged as confidential, so not released).
http://mhgoldberg.com/blog/2009/01/n...rrogatory.html