Rules may need to be reviewed: think tank

Canada’s telecom regulator may need to rethink its net neutrality rules to accommodate the nascent Internet of Things industry, a think tank argued in a report released Thursday.

The Montreal Economic Institute’s fourth annual report on the state of competition in Canada’s telecommunications industry suggested that the expected proliferation of the Internet of Things — connected devices such as self-driving cars, home appliances, medical sensors — may require a caveat that all data shouldn’t be treated equally, the main tenet of net neutrality.

“For example, all these networks that will deal with self-driving cars, you will have to prioritize these data packets,” co-author Martin Masse said in an interview on the report he wrote with Paul Beaudry. “Otherwise cars will just bump into each other if you give them the same priority as some cat video.”

The Canadian Radiotelevision and Telecommunications Commission strengthened its net neutrality rules last month in a decision that prevents network operators from favouring certain content. While the decision explicitly states it applies only to the public Internet, not managed networks that support certain uses including some Internet of Things applications, Masse said the CRTC may have to revisit the rules within a few years to account for the growing industry that will require next-generation networks to support massive amounts of data.

“Even though it’s not on the radar screen of almost anyone in the general public… it’s really going to have a major impact on telecommunications debates,” Masse said.

It’s not yet clear how networks that support critical applications such as self-driving cars will be set up, who will own them or whether data will travel over public or managed networks. Still, Masse emphasized the need for flexibility in the rules for managing these networks.

The think-tank, a proponent of free markets, also argued the CRTC should back off policies that help smaller players that don’t own their own networks, such as mandated wholesale access to fibre-to-thehome networks. Such policies reduce incentives for major carriers to invest at the margin, the report argued, and network investment will be critical to meet the data requirements of the Internet of Things era.