Rogers: All Your Internet Are Belong To Us

Search engine giant Google Inc. says it's "concerned" about efforts by Rogers Communications Inc. to insert branded corporate messages into third-party websites, a move critics say is a case of a Internet service provider overstepping its boundaries.

Toronto-based Rogers confirmed yesterday that it has spent the past few weeks testing a new technology that allows it to post Web-based notices to its Internet subscribers when they are approaching their monthly data limits.

The messages carry Rogers' name and logo and appear in the body of Web pages in place of original content, not as a pop-up window. One such notice, posted online, showed the Rogers content occupying the top third of Google's normally sparse search page.

The search giant was not impressed with the makeover.

"We are concerned about these reports," Google said in an emailed statement to the Toronto Star.

"As a general principle, we believe that maintaining the Internet as a neutral platform means that carriers shouldn't be able to interfere with Web content without users' permission," the Google statement said. "We are in the process of contacting the relevant parties to bring this to a quick resolution."

Some bloggers noted the Rogers notice on Google's search page seemed more like free advertising than a customer-service bulletin, since it suggested the user "upgrade to another level of service which provides higher usage limits and speeds by visiting rogers.com."

Critics say Rogers' move, though perhaps well-intentioned, could set a dangerous precedent that says it's okay for the companies that pipe the Internet into people's homes and offices to exercise control over their subscribers activity online.

"It's a very slippery slope," said Philippa Lawson, the executive director of the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic.

Toronto Star - Google decries Rogers-branded website messages - December 12, 2007

You can see a screenshot on Lauren Weinstein's Blog.

Comments

[Christina Pikas]

You're kidding me -- you have monthly data limits for your internet access? At home? Really? for high speed internet?

[Richard Akerman]

Canada generally has pretty good high-speed Internet and has had so for a long time. 8000 Kbps down / 800 up is Can$53 from Rogers. But there is indeed a bandwidth cap. You'd have to work fairly hard to exceed it though: 100 gigabytes(GB)/month. They are reasonably up-front about the cap (now). Oddly the fastest service - 18,000 down / 1000 up for $100 a month, has only a 90GB cap. They provide good online tools for viewing your usage, I typically use about 4GB a month, and that's with non-stop web, software updates, photo uploads and World of Warcraft.

That being said, I can certainly imagine there are lots of people who never read any of the information about caps (which was not so prominent or even existent on older versions of their signup pages) and who never check their online usage stats, and who have BitTorrent running 24/7.

Honestly, I expect mostly people are constantly torrenting movies and TV shows if they hit their cap - which maybe is their neutral net right, I guess it depends on your expectations from your ISP.

That being said, with iTunes Canada now offering TV shows, and with more legal Internet video an inevitability, I can see it becoming an issue. Or if you upload a lot of videos to YouTube or wherever. Another scenario I can imagine is hard drive backups - if you decided to push a copy of your HD over to e.g. Amazon S3, you'd almost certainly hit the cap. If I decide to start using Internet backup, it may become more of a concern for me.