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As a few hundred scruffy protesters gathered in Ottawa yesterday to support Net Neutrality, busloads of teenagers on school trips to visit Canada’s seat of government walked past them, blissfully unaware that the fight to keep Facebook free was happening right next to them.

Neutrality should be an easy sell: Nobody wants ISPs to be able to treat traffic differently, fearing it will lead to monthly “Google plans” or “Skype charges.”

But it quickly gets complicated. Rather than trying to win one battle, special interest groups bring in other fights: Tier-two ISPs want unfettered access to the last mile on wholesale links. Privacy advocates warn of prying eyes on the wires and at the borders. The specter of copyright enforcement looms large. And telcos complain that peer-to-peer is breaking their networks.

It shouldn’t be this way. Canada’s Net Neutrality debate has easy-to-spot villains: Bell and Rogers, who own most of the retail Internet, are both part of large media corporations. Bell has recently been caught red-handed shaping traffic, something second-tier ISPs like Teksavvy have long claimed.

Bell’s meddling recently became apparent when CBC Television released a new show, Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister, with BitTorrent. Because of traffic shaping, domestic downloads took five times as long as those in foreign countries. “There had been a lot of suspicion about traffic shaping, not just on Bell’s retail network but also on the wholesale network,” said Tom Copeland, chair of the Canadian Association of Internet Providers. “We were finding that rather than taking a couple of hours to download the show it was taking 10 or 12 hours.”

This time, it wasn’t just the nerds who were mad. Respectable citizens trying to get their programming from a national institution were furious. An unprecedented 1,200 consumers filed formal complaints with the country’s broadcasting and regulatory body, the CRTC.

It’s a golden opportunity for advocates to make Net Neutrality simple and relevant. Yesterday’s rally, organized by a coalition of technology and free speech groups, coincided with the introduction of a private member’s bill by member of parliament, Charlie Angus. But unless they stick to the mainstream, they risk being ignored by politicians and the general public once again and letting well-monied carriers have their way with the Internet.

Last week I got a chance to sit down with John Lilly, the newly appointed CEO of Mozilla Corp. We were slotted to chat a long time ago, but unfortunately life got in the way of our plans. He appeared on The GigaOM Show in February, and was interviewed by Joyce Kim and Liz Gannes.

Still, the two of us always wanted to chat. And that’s what we finally did, discussing everything from shortcomings of today’s browsers, Mozilla’s late entry into the world of mobiles and Firefox 3.0, which according to Lilly will go final and be ready to download in June 2008. (Mozilla just released the RC 1, which our sister site, OStatic, reviewed.) One of a few things we agreed on was that browsers need to find a better way of handling media - not just photos but the video clips that are becoming prevalent all over the net. He took a little swipe at iPhone as well, which was kinda cool.

Now this isn’t a produced video segment, and I captured the chat using my Macbook Pro’s built-in camera using the PhotoBooth. There are a whole bunch of people walking around in the background, and there are moments of questionable audio quality. Nevertheless, it is still fun and edited down to a consumable time length. Check it out.

The FCC has scheduled a second set of network management hearings to be held on the Stanford campus on April 17. A do-over of the hearings that were held last month at Harvard, perhaps? That gathering was driven, at least in part, by Comcast throttling BitTorrent traffic. The new hearings are also driven by Comcast, which paid folks to fill the lecture hall where the original hearings were held.

• SAI: BitTorrent CEO: Rethinking Media Store, No Business Impact from Comcast
• CNet: Verizon Touts Smart P2P Technology
• ArsTechnica: $5 a Month for Legal P2P Could Happen Sooner Than you Think
• Broadband Reports: Comcast Sues FCC Over 30% Cap
• Reuters: U.S. Video Games Sales Jump 34% in Feb.
• The Globe and Mail: Quebecor Enters Race for Wireless Spectrum

The BBC sure knows how to entice users — geeky, spec-obsessed users, that is. First they launch a beautiful player, then quickly unleash details about how much bandwidth it uses, spawning green-eyed monsters all over the world. And today their device goes mobile, with Anthony Rose, the Beeb’s head of digital media, laying out the specs on what exactly is involved in bringing the BBC’s programming to the myriad of mobile devices out there.

This means that every programme needs to be transcoded in a Flash version (for PC streaming), a WMV version (Windows PC download), MPEG2 (TV set-top box), H.264 (web browser), and a variety of other formats coming soon. To do this, we have a transcoding farm of over 50 rack-mount PCs, most of which are running really fast dual quad-core Xeon CPUs. As content arrives off tape (for pre-recorded programmes) or off-air (from our digital satellite links, for live content like news and sport), it’s fed into the transcoding platform. Those input files are encoded at over 50Mbps which makes them huge - around 25GB per hour of incoming video. With eight BBC TV channels plus 18 regional news broadcasts, that means we need to deal with up to 24 simultaneous incoming programmes, for a peak data rate of over a gigabit per second of incoming video.

The post does a good job showing how multiple standards are a headache, but can be worked around. Rose also talks frankly about the problems of developing an application for the many flavors of mobile handsets.

It is also a great example of why it’s not silly to pursue Moore’s Law, 100 Gigabit Ethernet or all-fiber networks. Like alcoholics at a bar, there’s no way we’ll one day just look up and realize that we’re done with computing power and broadband. We can always use more. And like our proverbial barfly, one day something — be they environmental factors or human ones– will remind us of our limits.

Online financial news show “Wallstrip” got a new host this week, Julie Alexandria, and she’s planning on spicing things up. NewTeeVee editor Liz Gannes has the interview.

Also this week, India saw its biggest-ever IPO debut: Reliance Power. So if it’s about new power, it must be green, right? In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Read more over on Earth2Tech.