At Fresh Hot Type, the after party for the Fresh Media Festival on Oct. 24, local media arts group W2 provided a letterpress with which partygoers could experiment. The idea was that as the DJs spin in the background, participants could creatively express themselves by using the letterpress, ink and paper. Not satisfied with what seemed like the natural limits of the medium, participants soon began writing words and expressions on both their own and each other's bodies and acting out the words on the dance floor.

There was something different in the air this time. The room still screamed of bureaucracy: the decorative flags at the front of the room, the plain suits, the stenographers. But the July CRTC hearing on traffic management (a.k.a net neutrality) had a dynamism to it that seemed foreign to the walls that contained it. Normally a hearing like this would be reserved for so-called "stakeholders." This time around there was a buzz in the room, and that buzz was literally the twitter of public discussion that forced its way into a hearing.

This past week the country's biggest Internet Service Providers (ISPs) paraded in front of the CRTC as part of that commission's inquiry into bandwidth throttling.

To listen to the ISPs, you'd think their biggest problem was wrestling with the complexities of an increasingly congested Internet. But it's not. Their biggest problem is that more and more Canadians think they're lying sacks of shite.

Sure, as a recent Canadian Press Harris-Decima poll found, only about one in five Canadians surveyed had heard of Internet traffic management bandwidth throttling, deep packet inspection or net neutrality.

And the ISPs are fueling (and counting on) that ignorance as they spread FUD (fear uncertainty and doubt) at the hearings.

The great value of the open Internet is that it allows us to envision and, in fact, produce a more democratic media system.

But the open Internet is under threat by the very companies that bring it into our homes and workplaces, Internet Service Providers (ISPs). These big telecommunication companies want to become the gatekeepers of the Internet, charging hefty fees to reach large audiences, as they do with other mediums.