I know today’s comic isn’t that funny, but seriously. What a douche move. Basically, Netflix has just arrived in Canada and between that, straight up piracy and Cable TV sucking total mega balls, Bell is losing revenue on it’s cable service. Unfortunately for us, Bell owns the Internet cables as well as the cable channel CTV. So they’ve convinced the CRTC (the Canadian equivalent of the FCC) to let them introduce Usage Based Billing, so they can charge people for internet by the gigabyte. In some cases people’s internet will be capped at 13Gb per month, and it will cost $5 for every Gb over the limit. So if you buy a game on Steam (some of which can be ~20Gb to download) you could possibly end up paying $60 for a game, then $20 extra to Bell just for the privilege of installing it.
It’s basically a case of Bell being too shitty to provide an online service like the one Netflix has managed to rustle up in a year or two, despite Netflix being a new company and Bell being ancient and having billions of dollars. So instead of thinking “Hey, people are moving away from cable and watching more stuff online, let’s concentrate on providing a good online service.” Bell has decided on “Let’s just break the whole internet and force people back to our shitty cable.”
Oh, and also it’s very difficult to switch ISP’s, because they almost all lease their lines from Bell, who are forcing them all to adopt this bullshit policy. Like I said, dicks.
