said by jvaux :

One thing that was mentioned during the presentation by the IFTA, but I don't think has been put enough emphasis on:

A lot of the talk has centered around filtering based on application and how that might cause an unfair market advantage for certain businesses. The thing is, it might not create an unfair advantage for the company doing the filtering, but still causes issues.

It seems the big providers are saying "Well, we do it to everyone, so it must be fair". But, imagine the situation where a bunch of independent Canadian artists open an online store based on P2P, and another opens one based on another technology. Obviously, the store using P2P is going to be injured by the filtering if it's done to a large portion of Canadians (their customers.) Not because the online store is being filtered, but because a large portion of Canadians are. The store can't change providers and solve the problem -- hence the "There's duopoly, so there's choice" argument it moot. As well, the Canadians being filtered probably don't even know they're being filtered (even if the ISP told them, they wouldn't make the connection that downloading from Company A is slower than B due to the ISP - They're jsut goign to assume that Company A sucks.) nor would anyone change ISPs just to be able to shop at another store online.

An Internet provider can't possibly see all the ramifications of what filtering content on a large portion of Canadians will have. Which is why they shouldn't have the option of filtering by application at all.