A Little Late, Boys

The Liberal Party has always by turns amused, frustrated, enamoured, and repelled me. They can be at turns brilliant and utterly bankrupt when it comes to working to help the proverbial "common man" (whatever that is). More often than not, they are a standard political party, so I suppose I shouldn't complain too much: they exist to serve the powerful, and to ensure that the political hierarchy of Canada remains relatively unruffled. The differences between the Conservatives and their "Liberal" opponents remain, sadly, rather small.

Witness this: http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2008/07/15/tech-texting.html.

Not a bad thing to do on the surface, right? Blasting the encumbent government for failing to keep text-message costs low sounds like a decent thing to do. But the problem is, what are they going to actually do about it? Are they going to actually call an election over it? Put in a private members bill?

This raises the spectre of a related issue, net neutrality, which is one of my personal pet projects. Here, the NDP put forward a private member's bill to try and ensure that people's browsing speed would not be throttled by the big Internet Service Providers (ISPs):
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2008/05/28/tech-netbill.html

The key part of this second article, for our purposes here, is the bit at the end: Scott Brison, the Liberal MP mentioned with such thunder and fury in the first article above, has yet to say anything more about the subject, even though he had *already met with Bell and Rogers,* the two biggest ISPs in Canada. So, while I'm pleased to see that Brison is taking on these two corporations with regards to fees for cell phones, that's only half the issue with them.

Welcome to the debate, Liberals. Nice to see show up. After all, Google and the NDP can't do everything themselves (http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2008/07/07/tech-crtc.html).

This is, again, related to my first point: the Liberals and Conservatives alike are mainstream political parties. Their mandate is to get elected, to represent a certain viewpoint of the majority of people and, simultaneously, of the elite, in parliament. The problem is, these two goals are conflicting: what the many desire, the elite do not always agree with. Net neutrality is critical for those of us end-users who rely on the Internet for our news, and for the access to information it provides that those of us outside the elite usually lack access to via regular channels. But, throttling makes sense to the ISPs, to those making money off of the internet, because it keeps their costs low--they charge us the same amount for less service. Easy money.

Again, where do the Liberals come down on this? It seems that Brison is finally weighing in slightly on one of these issues. Even Prentice, the technology minister, has pointed his finger at the ISPs in criticism. But that's not the same as introducing bills to change things for the better. The problem, I fear, is that both major players, the Liberals and Conservatives, want to promise better service and protection for the average user--that's you, me, Jane and Joe Everybody, that amorphous blob that is the "average voter" and their target constituency--but in doing so, they have to take on their other major constituency, the elites that give them their power, from whom they draw the greatest resources and the primary source of their internal membership.

Watching which way the two big players dodge will be interesting. I worry, however, that they will likely be dodging towards the side of safety and the elite, leaving the rest of us to deal with the consequences. As usual.