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Bill C-398: An Act to amend the Telecommunications Act (Internet neutrality)

Proposed 2009 Canadian bill

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionApr 18, 2026
Entity authorityQ13515753 ↗
Source-derived summary

Bill C-398: An Act to amend the Telecommunications Act (Internet neutrality) (French: Projet de Loi C-398: Loi modifiant la Loi sur les télécommunications (neutralité d'Internet) was tabled in the Parliament of Canada by Charlie Angus, the MP for Timmins—James Bay, on May 29, 2009, on the second session of the 40th Parliament.

Bill C-398 aimed to prohibit various forms of discrimination by telecommunications service providers. It would have provided that: "Network management practices that favour, degrade or prioritize any content, application or service transmitted over a broadband network based on its source, ownership, destination or type" would be specifically prohibited, subject to certain exceptions.

Telecommunications service providers would have been able to use reasonable management practices in order to alleviate extraordinary congestion, may prioritize emergency communications, and assure the security of computers and networks in a reasonable manner. ISPs, according to the proposed bill , would also be allowed to charge users on a usage-based basis as well as offer directly to users consumer protection services that may discriminate, provided notice was given to users as well as a possibility to opt-out.

The bill would also have prohibited telecommunications service providers to hamper foreign device attachment to their networks provided the device would neither damage nor degrade the network. Telecommunications service providers would also have been obligated to render available to users at all time information about the speed, limitations and management practices that were in effect.

History

The bill was a re-submitted version of Bill C-552 which was introduced one day after 300 protesters came to Parliament in May 2008. The Net Neutrality movement in Canada had accelerated since telecom providers Bell Canada and Rogers were found to have throttled their users P2P traffic. Liberal MP David McGuinty had followed closely on the heels of Angus' first private member initiative with a private bill of his own, C-555.

Editorial summary

“Bill C-398: An Act to amend the Telecommunications Act (Internet neutrality)” enters the record as proposed 2009 Canadian bill. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Bill, C-398 and amend can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2009, 2008—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Bill, C-398 and amend.
Editorial analysis

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“Bill C-398: An Act to amend the Telecommunications Act (Internet neutrality)” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Bill, C-398 and amend provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q13515753. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2009 and 2008.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Bill C-398: An Act to amend the Telecommunications Act (Internet neutrality)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.