If the idea of shipping supplies to a needy nation makes you think of famine appeals for war-torn African countries, heres an example closer to home. An impromptu website called Canadian Download has spent the last few days taking hundreds of orders for large files, which it then burns onto DVD and ships north of the border for free.
Has Canada run out of bandwidth? Not exactly, but it may be about to get a whole lot more expensive. A recent decision by the countrys telecom regulator said that ISPs could start charging based on how much their customers used the Internet. In a country where Netflix streaming has caught on, this was bound to have a major impact on users wallets (and was seen in some quarters as a way for cable company ISPs to strike back against the Netflix threat). Many Canadians were outraged, the government vowed to overturn the decision, and on Thursday regulators promised to review it.
But the threat of usage-based billing remains. It has a particular resonance in the U.S., where net neutrality advocates fear that large Internet providers may start doing something similar and where a vague FCC ruling has done nothing to abate that fear. (Just yesterday, Verizon said it would start slowing Internet access for the top 5% of mobile users, effective immediately.)
So the founders of a security camera company in Florida decided to take action. They launched the free Canadian Download service on Tuesday, hoping to establish a kind of underground railroad to send data north of the border, should ISPs start gouging customers. In its first day of operation, the site downloaded more than 100 GB of requested information. (Naturally, it refuses to ship anything related to porn or piracy.)
By yesterday, the non-profit site was looking at a cost of $1,000 to burn and ship disks. But the founders vowed to continue eating the costs. As a company, we care because a metered Internet in Canada is a threat to entrepreneurship everywhere, said an update on the site.
It could also be a canny investment in the future. If the Canadian regulators decision is overturned, and US-based ISPs continue to inch towards a metered Internet, we may see data disks being shipped in the opposite direction some day.
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