The Internet Pokes Fun at Canadian Internet Rates

A few Internet sites are bringing some humour the serious issue of usage-based billing in Canada. A new decision by the CRTC (Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission) forces all ISP’s in Canada to charge customers for a pay-per-use Internet, and the legislation is truly laughable.

CRTCrazy

The CRTCrazy site was created as joke to highlight the ridiculous usage-based rates in Canada. This site has now gone viral and the creator of the site tells us that CRTCrazy is now getting almost 1.5 sign-ups a minute. The site suggests that it will enable Canadians to download files within its service and asks users to request the size of the harddrive that will be mailed to them. Most people are requesting between 150 to 3000 GB a month.

It’s pretty sad when people are seriously interested in this and tweet about how they wish this site wasn’t a joke. – Zach of CRTCrazy

CanadianDownload

This site pokes fun at Canadians but it’s seriously offering to send users files by snail mail. CanadianDownload asks users to input a download link of the file they want, including their shipping address. It’s stated on the site that it will download any file for you for free as long as it’s not pornography or copyright protected. After submitting the information, users are redirected to a site to protest the bandwidth caps and usage-based billing.

We have had over 130,000 people visit in the last 12 hours, over 100 requests for major downloads, and in addition to CDs and DVDs and hard drives we need to buy, we have about 500-1000 US dollars that we will need to shell out for shipping. If you can donate that would be awesome. We want to keep this free.

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The image below has gone viral and highlights the fact that with monthly bandwidth caps in Canada, it will cost $2 per GB extra for “overuse”. And as it’s stated in the pic, the cost of Internet in Canada is more expensive than putting data on an expensive SSD harddrive and mailing it across the country.

Yesterday, we posted some good news about the government stepping in. It appears that the government is going to overturn CRTC’s decision, we hope.