Back in 2009, Canada passed network neutrality rules designed to protect consumers from anti-competitive treatment of network traffic, though at the time there was a lot of concern about the rules being adequately enforced. Canadian Law Professor Michael Geist was curious what was being done for consumers who claims they've had a problem with their ISP, so he filed an Access to Information request to gain access to the collected CRTC data.

What he found was that CRTC investigations into complaints often are very superficial in nature and the complaints are often dismissed without serious inquiry. While nearly all Canadian ISPs saw complaints, Rogers Communications saw the most (nearly half) says Geist:Many of the complaints appear to be instances where the ISP was being incompetent -- not malicious (though as a commenter correctly notes, denying the problem exists and penalizing the user for Rogers' own incompetence could be construed as such). In the Rogers WOW example, which we discussed at length last March, it's a result of Rogers not being competent enough to get their network management systems to work properly with the popular game. There's no competitive reason to throttle WOW, which outside of large patches really doesn't impact the network. Bell was also found accidentally throttling a storage-locker service.

While there's no doubt the CRTC isn't being particularly aggressive or transparent, it's not really clear that you can call incompetence a network neutrality violation. We've seen many cries of neutrality wolf over the years. Still, when there were actually were complaints that appear to hint at genuine violations, Geist insists that the CRTC's version of an investigation involved an e-mail or two to the ISP, who would then change their TOS but not really change their practices. Geist's hoping that the CRTC will ultimately publish all public complaints and problem resolutions "so that the issues obtain a public airing."