Today, the same petition, which is now run by the rock-star professor Michael Geist, has collected over 14,000 signatures. Clearly something has changed. We can all thank Bell Canada for turning a hypothetical threat into the personal cause of thousands of Canadian internet users.

What Bell did was to throttle P2P traffic while, almost simultaneously, launching competitive video-on-demand services — and that's what the Net Neutrality Rally in Ottawa last week was all about: competition. The technology that is being throttled by Bell is primarily used to distribute video content on-line.

Some of it is copyright infringing content like pirated movies and TV shows, but increasingly, it is legitimate content from outfits like Bitorrent Inc, Vuze, and even our own CBC which attempted to distribute Canada's Next Great Prime Minister using this technology. Canada's limited competition in 'last-mile' connectivity is making matters worse. Typically, in any given market there is a duopoly consisting of two giants — a cable company and a phone company.

For most users, this is a binary choice that represents no real market choice. Partly in response to this lack of competition, Bell was required to open up its lines to competitive resellers. For a while, this reseller arrangement resembled some form of competition — at least in customer service, if not pricing. One such reseller is TekSavvy, which, seeing the benefit to a neutral network, promised never to interfere with its customers' traffic — and in the process stole a large number of accounts from Bell.

Then came the shocking realization that Bell, acting as the network 'owner', was starting to degrade specific traffic on these resellers services, and in the process was breaking TekSavvy's non-interference promise to its customers. Bell's actions exerted control over its supposed competitors' services. On April 3rd, the Canadian Association of Internet Providers, filed a complaint against Bell with the CRTC.

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