In case anybody missed it, Canada has reaffirmed its commitment to an open Internet - no throttling. So the best way to ensure a fair and balanced Internet for your new company might be to run a bunch of dark fiber links up to the North and use their backbone to connect everything. The Canadians have been through all this before and learned their lessons the hard way.
/ * This is a little long, so please bear with me */
True story: I was part of the team that ran the first Internet link into Canada, way back in the late '80s. That first link was slow (as in “56k link for a single computer science department” slow) but it got the job done, as we were at first serving just a single department in our university.
As word spread of our new technological marvel, just like everybody else who had a link we quickly became incredibly popular and folks started coming out of the woodwork asking for hookups to get themselves some of that cool Internet fix.
First it was other departments, then other colleges, then other universities across the province, then other folks who justified their need as supporting the province’s researchers. This same scenario was playing out in each province, over the span of a couple of years in the late '80s and early '90s (and yes, I can affirm that the first few steps of an exponential growth process can be a boatload of fun!).
Of course, as the other provinces came online, Canadian users started to want to communicate with each other, so our link began seeing more and more traffic heading down to the States just so it could traverse over the growing U.S. backbone and back up the appropriate link to Vancouver or Toronto or Calgary, etc.
So fast forward a couple years and Canadian government and university administrators began to see the light and started planning a nationwide Canadian backbone. Now, distances were pretty vast for the smaller Canadian population of would-be users (remember, at this point we were still mainly a research and teaching tool) so inter-provincial link speeds were just not as fast as the links we were operating down to the faster backbone our more numerous American counterparts could afford. No biggie, we had less traffic so things would stay local, right?
Well, the way this Internet thing works at its heart is based upon the idea that each packet is free to find its own way to the destination, and will try to do so as fast as possible based on current traffic patterns. So guess what? Yup, all those inter-Canadian packets continued to find their way down south, across and back up again. The folks building the new backbone actually tried to play with the routing to get the traffic to stay in the Canadian slow lane but that just meant that Canadian traffic sucked, but U.S. bound traffic was just fine. As a friend of mine pointed out at the time, we all were just constantly rooting for a Canadian Internet outage, as that would immediately bump up transmission speeds across the entire country!
Eventually the folks building the backbone realized that their crude attempt at censorship just wasn’t working. We kept beefing up our American bound links to handle all the extra traffic and they had to keep beefing up the inter-provincial links until eventually the Canadian backbone folks got their stuff up to modern fiber speeds and we all had access to the ubiquitous coverage we have today.
The take-away is an important one that this fascinating technology continues to teach us to this day - ***“The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it”***.
Sorry for the length of this, but the Internet has been trying to teach us this basic lesson from day one, and it seems as a collective group, humanity just won’t listen. Canadians got it early, let’s see how long it takes the U.S. to repeat those same mistakes and figure it out, too.
One last comment on all this: When we brought up that first TC/IP-based Internet link, we were also running two other types of network for communicating with other campuses (one based on IBM technology for connecting mainframes and another based upon dial-up standards for exchanging email). Both systems were mandated by higher ups, both sought to impose much more rigid control, and both failed and were absorbed by the TCP/IP-based Internet within a couple of years.
But hey, again - no biggie, right? All America really risks here is an essential part of our modern infrastructure, our international standing as a world technological leader and eventually our security (hey, if we do route all that traffic up north, we’ll be putting our backbone traffic in the hands of those nefarious Canadians - who knows what they’ll do with it!?!).
But a bunch of Republican politicians got to pocket a lot of cash, so all’s good, right?