The City of Vancouver doesn't like usage-based billing (UBB) for Internet access; this kind of traffic metering "will act as a tax on innovation, free expression, and empowerment," according to the city council. In addition, metering "discriminates" against high-bandwidth applications like audio and video. Remove the caps!

Yesterday, the Vancouver city council passed a resolution on "Affordable Internet Access in Vancouver" in which it railed against UBB and blasted incumbent Internet providers like Bell Canada for imposing "unjust financial limitations on how many gigabytes of usage their independent competitors can provide to their customers."

The dispute began back in 2008, when Bell Canada instituted P2P traffic shaping and then bandwidth caps on its DSL—both of which it also passed on to the independent ISPs who purchased line-sharing service from Bell Canada. The indie ISPs would now have to pay a per-user fee each month, plus overage charges for each customer who used "too much" bandwidth. An indie ISP's total bandwidth use wouldn't matter; every individual customer who exceeded the caps would have to pay.

The indie ISPs cried "high sticking!" In their view, Bell Canada was making it almost impossible for them to distinguish their service from Bell's, which they had typically done by offering higher caps or uncapped access to the Internet. Now, Bell was making their per-customer cap decisions for them. And because Bell still controlled most of the last-mile copper phone wiring in Canada, its decision would affect most indie DSL providers in the country.

Tom Copeland headed a coalition of small ISPs at the time, and he told Ars that UBB was the wrong way to go. It's "not a carrier class method of doing business," he said. "Carriers buy capacity on networks and they utilize that capacity in a manner that allows for the efficient delivery of products and services. The wholesale vendor of such a facility shouldn't interfere with the delivery of the product or service nor should they apply what amounts to a surcharge when an end user decides to make use of the product or service."

The ISPs went to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), the Canadian equivalent of the FCC, and asked for relief. In a May 2010 ruling, the CRTC noted that it "also received a large number of comments, mostly from individuals, that almost unanimously opposed the Bell companies' applications." Still, CRTC sided with Bell, noting that cable companies had long used UBB in their own wholesale agreements with indie ISPs and that Bell is not imposing any conditions on others that are not imposed on its own customers. (When Bell tried to get away with offering higher speeds through its own brand than resellers could access, the CRTC said no.)

That led to protests from groups like OpenMedia.ca, which launched a "Stop the Meter!" campaign. OpenMedia backed the Vancouver resolution, which calls on CRTC to change its mind.

Steve Anderson, OpenMedia's national coordinator, said that "Big Telecom should not be free to define what constitutes a 'reasonable' amount of Internet usage while their interests are clearly out of line with those of Canadians, who are integrating broadband into more and more facets of their everyday lives. The imposition of usage-based billing, and its control by major ISPs, dooms our broadband marketplace to permanent second-class status in the global digital economy."

Vancouver's city council, at least, appears to agree. Whether it will make any difference remains to be seen.