Net Neutrality & Canadian Punks
I love Canadians.
Ars Technica recently published an article about a Canadian member of parliament (MP) named Charlie Angus, and his struggle to fight ‘traffic shaping’ by telecom giant and all-around badie, Bell Canada. Angus is a vocal advocate for net neutrality, and he apparently presented a response bill before the Canadian congress in order to spark a debate on the matter. You can hear a fairly interesting interview with the man on the May 22nd episode from Search Engine, a radio show and CBC podcast.
Key quote from the MP3 interview (00:14:09) with Charlie Angus:
“The language around the internet, at best its a consumer at worst you’re a hacker and a pirate. We should be talking about online citizens. It’s a cultural commons that’s been created. If we don’t respect that, we’re gonna be in a situation where–whether its legislation like the DMCA or net neutrality being taken away–the internet is gonna be reduced to something that, again, the few large media giants are in charge of and not the citizens.”
Mr. Angus’s efforts in government are indeed admirable, but what makes this story all the more interesting is that before crafting public policy, Angus was once (perhaps still is) a Canadian guitar hero–a master of the ‘low end’ (bass) to be precise. In the early 1980s, Angus wielded his axe for a three-piece, socially-conscious, Montreal punk band called L’Etranger, and now he’s a musician and founding member of the well-known alt-country outfit, Grievous Angels.
I found a proto music video on YouTube for ‘Goliath,’ a song by L’Etrangers. It’s sort of like the Clash meets a bottle of Labatt. Rawk!
Let’s hope the our quirky neighbors to the north can do better than my fellow Americans have in stemming the growth of privatized networks…eh?!
