Canadian Federal Court Has Now Officially Ordered ISPs to Block GoldTV
- Canada’s Federal Court decides to force ISPs in the country to block all GoldTV domains.
- TekSavvy and about 70,000 Canadians are opposing this dawn of Internet censorship in the country.
- If the case moves forward, the piracy scene in Canada is poised to change fundamentally.
According to a report by ReclaimTheNet, Canada has entered the age of ISP-level blocking, as the country’s Federal Court has issued an unprecedented order that concerns Bell, Rogers, Videotron, Eastlink, Cogeco, Fido, Shaw Communications, TekSavvy Solutions, and Telus Corp. Some of these ISPs were actually urging the lawmakers to push for stricter measures and wanted GoldTV to serve as a test case for an effective IPTV blocking plan in Canada. Back in August, media broadcasting companies who also happen to operate ISP service providers in the country obtained an interim injunction against GoldTV, so the blocking of the website was the natural next step to take.
GoldTV is a pirate IPTV platform that was operating "GoldTV.biz" and "GoldTV.ca." The platform was offering thousands of films and series belonging to the Bell Media, Groupe TVA, and Rogers Media portfolio, as well as live TV feeds. Some noteworthy examples include The Big Bang Theory, SouthPark, Sex and the City, Arrow, Family Feud, Hell’s Kitchen, America’s Got Talent, and sports feeds from the FA Cup, The Premier League, NBA, Indycar, Tour de France, and many more. All this large-scale and blatant copyright infringement made GoldTV an exceptional case to test the new measures on.
Now, ISPs are expected to block all domains and subdomains of the target website, as well as all the IP addresses associated with GoldTV. This has to be done within 15 days, otherwise, the ISPs who are still serving connections to the domains will be penalized. The only ISP who is openly opposing the measure is TekSavvy, who is known for holding a strong stance against internet censorship in general. They consider such measures as a violation of the Telecommunications Act and going against net neutrality regulations. Finally, they believe that blocks are technically a waste of time and resources anyway. As the company states, people will simply use VPNs, whereas they will be burdened with unfair blocking requirements even further.
TekSavvy may be the only ISP who expressed their objection to the court’s order, but the citizens are on their side too. Already, there are 70,000 Canadians who have signed a relevant petition, warning about the risks of entering a slippery slope that would enable the government to control what is allowed online and what’s not. They accuse the 25 organizations that brought the situation to this point and demand the withdrawal of all of the proposed restrictions. The truth is, if the plaintiffs are successful this time, there’s nothing stopping them from obtaining blocking orders for whatever else they want to shut down in the future.
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