If you’ve been following the ongoing talks between Bell Canada and the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission lately, you’ve probably noticed at least two things: anger and frustration. No doubt about it: the very nature of the Internet as we know it is under siege. The issue at hand kicked off a couple weeks ago. It surrounds the CRTC provisionally handing over to Bell the right to impose usage-based billing on the backs of its wholesale customers, namely smaller Internet Service Providers (ISPs) — which have survived by presenting a better deal than the multi-tentacled Bell.

Ask its wireless clients: Bell is quite at home with gouging its customers, and along with Rogers and Telus is a happy co-conspirator in Canada, widely considered one of the worst environments for cellphone users in the developed world. According to Ottawa digital freedom-fighter Michael Geist, we stink in terms of competition, “walled garden” application control, pricing transparency, and as most of you know, contractual terms — where endless three-year contracts are the ridiculous prison sentence in Canada. Never mind quality of options. I mean, did you know for years now you’ve been able to walk into a convenience store in Japan and pay for your groceries instantly with a cellphone scanner, then continue to watch any TV channel live for the rest of the ride home?

If Bell has its way, it appears, the Internet would be as customer-unfriendly as its wireless devices, perhaps eventually charging increasing prices for content by each and every byte. The ISP underdogs who rent Bell’s pipes have fewer caps on bandwidth, which of course makes savvy customers happy. Starting in November, if this CRTC empowerment goes through, Bell can easily price its competition out of the market. They’ll claim they need the money to keep competitive and maintain their infrastructure, the building of much of which was generously helped along with federal grants in the first place. The knee-jerk idea that the risk was entirely Bell’s is technically incorrect.

This last note in particular has made a lot of people besides ISPs wonder just what the CRTC is for — you can head to dissolvethecrtc.ca and saveournet.ca for more on this. But if, during the Internet revolution, the government structurally assisted Bell (as it indeed does many companies all the time), but then subsequently fails to regulate emerging monopolies and duopolies, how is the regulatory body doing its stated job of helping customers — you and me? As of Tuesday, the CRTC has asked a couple deeper questions of Bell, but many claim it’s just lip service. If they don’t get tough with Bell (and Telus and Rogers), what are they even for, besides creating an environment where the worst shows in history, like Little Mosque on the Prairie and the thankfully now-dead Wild Roses, circumvent the most basic qualifying rules of survival?

I bring those shows up for a reason, because one of my biggest beefs with the CRTC is that they time and time again have eliminated choice from our lives. Not by encouraging CanCon, which I can get behind, but for doing things like intentionally blocking HBO for years — the network responsible for the best television in human history.

And we all know what happened next: Canadians now legally download whatever show they like from all over the world. To the point where it now seems ridiculous that you would have to sit down and watch a show when anyone tells you to. Believe it or not, our Canadian laws don’t yet forbid downloading in this manner, so how can ISPs? It’s a fundamental part of “net neutrality,” which essentially means that ISPs can’t decide how you use the Internet any more than an oil company can tell you what kind of car you can drive. But Bell, having already been caught throttling competitor traffic speeds to suit its needs, has specifically cited peer-to-peer downloading as an impediment to its operational plan.

“Peer to peer,” remember, being you and me.