Tech Workers of Canada, Unite!

Just because the election hasn't featured too much discussion on usage-based billing or copyright laws doesn't mean people don't care about them.

“What party will stand for Canada's geeks?” asks Maclean's Jesse Brown in a plea to have the concerns of relatively apolitical techies voiced in the election campaign. Pointing to the 482,000 Canadians who signed the anti-usage-based-billing Stop the Meter petition, Brown suggests “these efforts aren't just the most popular Canadian political causes on the internet – they're among the most popular Canadian political causes anywhere.” Cellphone bills, bandwidth caps, and download speeds haven't been addressed by the major parties, says Brown, and the first party that does “stands to take every college-town riding in the country.”

The founder of indie ISP TekSavvy writes in the Financial Post that even though Bell has backed away from UBB, it's proposed another “cash grab” strategy. Aggregated Volume Pricing, or AVP, would see Bell charge the ISPs for the total bandwidth used by their clients instead of charging individual users who go over a pre-set limit, as was proposed under their UBB plan. “Like many such retreats, this is too little and too late,” says Rocky Gaudrault. “AVP is in fact another cash grab, still exorbitant, still disconnected from real costs and still based on what are, in our view, irrelevant capacity issues.” Gaudrault writes that Bell would charge 19.5 cents a gigabyte when the cost of that data is between one and eight cents, meaning a price markup of at least 250 per cent per gigabyte.

One bubbling tech issue is the Conservatives' claim that their opponents would introduce an “iPod tax," a matter batted away by Michael Geist. But the Tories' own proposed copyright legislation could see the levy on blank CDs double – with most of that money going to foreign artists – or have the current levy stay the same but cut Canadian artists' take in half, says Geist. “Raising questions about the parties' position on copyright ... is certainly fair game,” he says. “Perhaps the Conservatives should explain why they left the prospect of millions more in consumer copyright fees or millions in lost revenue for creators under the existing system untouched in their copyright bill.”