A Narrow Fix for a Real Information Gap
On September 10, 2026, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission issued Telecom Regulatory Policy CRTC 2026-238, ordering internet service providers to stop advertising internet plans by their theoretical "up to" ceiling and instead disclose the download speed, upload speed, and latency range customers can typically expect during weekday evening peak hours — 7 p.m. to 11 p.m., the exact window when home networks are most congested. "Canadians deserve clear information about speeds and prices when shopping for Internet services," CRTC Chairperson and CEO Vicky Eatrides said in announcing the decision.
The timeline is staged: most disclosure and pricing-prominence obligations take effect March 10, 2027, with a further requirement to publish plan data in standardized, machine-readable formats — enabling third-party comparison tools — by September 10, 2027. Carriers must also show post-promotional regular pricing with "equal or greater prominence" than discounted teaser rates, and disclose equipment rental fees up front.
The Case For It
The strongest argument for this rule is straightforward consumer economics: an "up to 1.5 Gbps" claim that a household never experiences during the hours it actually uses the internet is not false advertising in the legal sense, but it is functionally misleading, and ordinary consumers have no way to independently measure it before signing a contract. Peak-hour congestion is also where net neutrality's disclosure pillar has always lived — the 2009 Internet Traffic Management framework already required ISPs to explain how they manage network load, but never forced them to put a number on the result. Tying disclosure to the specific hours when traffic-management decisions bite is a logical, incremental extension of that principle, not a new intervention. And because carriers already measure real-world throughput internally for network planning, the marginal cost of publishing what they already know is genuinely low compared to, say, a rate-setting proceeding.
Why This Is the Right Kind of Regulation
That said, the rule deserves credit for what it doesn't do. It doesn't cap prices, mandate a minimum speed, or tell carriers how to manage congestion — it only requires them to tell the truth about the outcome. That distinction matters. Canada's net neutrality regime, anchored in Telecom Regulatory Policy 2017-104, has always rested on the premise that ISPs should compete on "price, quality of service, speeds, data allowance" rather than on favoring specific content or obscuring performance — and a disclosure-only mandate is the least-restrictive way to enforce that competition-on-merits logic. Firms remain free to build networks however they choose; they just can't market a number their infrastructure doesn't deliver when it counts. That is closer to a truth-in-advertising standard than a structural remedy, and it's the kind of proportionate, low-friction regulation this publication generally favors over heavier-handed price or access mandates.
Where the Skepticism Belongs
The more useful question is not whether disclosure is the right tool, but whether the CRTC has the enforcement capacity to make it bite. The same reporting on this decision notes that carriers previously responded to the CRTC's ban on activation, cancellation, and modification fees — in force since June 2026 — by introducing new categories of charges the regulator hadn't explicitly prohibited. A "typical speed" figure is compressible in the same way a fee schedule is: providers control the methodology behind the number (sample size, time-of-year averaging, geographic weighting) unless the CRTC also standardizes and audits how "typical" gets measured, not just that it gets published. Some providers have already told regulators compliance will be "costly and redundant" given existing measurement obligations — a complaint worth taking seriously for smaller regional ISPs with thinner compliance budgets than the national carriers, even if it shouldn't block the rule outright.
The Net Neutrality Angle Is Real, If Modest
It's worth being precise about what this decision is and isn't. It does not touch throttling, zero-rating, or differential pricing — the areas the 2017 framework was built to police. What it does is close a gap in that framework: net neutrality rules constrain how ISPs treat traffic, but until now said nothing about whether ISPs had to honestly report the performance customers get as a result of those traffic-management choices. Requiring evening-peak disclosure makes congestion — the practical, everyday face of network management — visible and comparable across providers for the first time. That's a meaningful transparency win even though it changes no carrier's actual network engineering.
The test between now and March 2027 is whether the CRTC pairs this mandate with a real measurement standard and audit function, rather than letting "typical" become as elastic a term as "unlimited" once was.