Slashdot Mirror
Every Time You Vote Against Net Neutrality, Your ISP Kills a Night Elf
Perhaps one of the more overlooked problems that could arise out of a bad Net Neutrality decision is the impact to online gaming. In fact, any interactive communications could stand to take a dive (VOIP, streaming video, etc) with the advent of Net Neutrality legislation. RampRate has an interesting look at the possible fallout and where we are headed. From the article: "What will be murdered with no fallback or replacement is the nascent market of interactive entertainment - particularly online gaming. Companies like Blizzard Entertainment, Electronic Arts, Sony Online Entertainment, and countless others, have built a business on the fundamental assumption of relatively low latency bandwidth being available to large numbers of consumers. Furthermore, a large -- even overwhelming -- portion of the value of these offerings comes from their 'network effects' -- the tendency for the game to become more enjoyable and valuable as larger number of players joins the gaming network."
Maybe then he'll do the dishes, or shower.
So you mean WoW players would be forced to have a life outside the Horde???? Isn't that a good thing?
Unto the upright there arises light in the darkness...
This gets my vote for the most catchy title since Fark's 'ceiling cat' incident.
- Just my $0.02, take with a grain of salt, your mileage may vary.
I thought this was always one of the largets conserns about the impact of net neutrality legislation?
Or the nagain, it might just be that I am an online game addict and thuso nly think about these things.
yah never know......
Do Or Do Not, There Is No Spoon, There Is Only Zuul. Everything in the above post is probably opinion.
As long as the kittens are spared. I don't feel bad about ISPs killing our Night Elves.
----- You know you have ego issues when you register a domain in your name.
As has been mentioned before, to legislators and industrialists, "online gaming" is part of the much older "gaming industry," which is the politically correct word for gambling. This article refers to "online computer games" which has an entirely different stigma involved. You have to speak with policymakers clearly, so they don't confuse tempt-husbands-to-wickedness gambling and train-kids-to-shoot-up-schools computer games.
[
There, now you don't have to RTFA.
People don't want to have to pay extra for something they were getting already. And we certainly don't want server operators to pay more for what they were getting standard. Besides that, we don't want things being blocked or intentionally degraded. Simply, keep the same user experience as now without increasing the price. If network providers aren't making a profit, then raise prices and let the market deal with it.
think of all the stockholders not profiting from the extra fees paid by MMORPG addicts for preferential routing to tonight's server
+1 fashionably cynical
Now, if *I* can't even understand it, how the Hell is Joe Sixpack supposed to?
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
There is nothing in the current laws, that requires ISPs to carry any particular type of traffic, yet the only stuff some of them have come around disabling is the outgoing port 25 (for good reasons), and the incoming ports 80 and 443 (for bad reasons)...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Don't count on it. My roommate came down with the flu a week before he got married and I ended up cleaning out the place after I moved out. I thought he was joking that there was puke on the floor until I almost step into it. The shower was worst. I don't know what it was but it was weird and pissed off when I tried to kill it. I was tempted to call his wife-to-be to come over to see it and ask her if she really wanted to marry this guy. God knows I scared her with the true state of his finances (a big number on the wrong side of zero) and she made him work 40+ hours per week after their honeymoon.
Doesn't all the night elves belong to the RIAA?
I have a GENIUS idea! Let these jackasses have "their" internet and the real users of internet can roll back to ARPANET era style. Communication can go back to messageboards, newsgroups, and IM over specific dedicated protocols.
Seriously if they actually manage to tear the internet to peices for their own goals, everyone else will just move beyond the white picket fence and resume business as usual. The tigher you grip the world in your hands, the more slips from between your fingers.
Disclaimer: my gemius idea is fuelled by Guniess so the actual genius of it will vary wildly.
If this is a big concern then the MMO operators should carry the weight of the bill to hire lobbyists. Of course, they dont represent the same economic weight as bandwidth providers.
It seems like a simple thing to figure out. Are the bandwidth providers in a situation where they are in the red? I dont think they are. So, do they need government price protections? I dont think so. This is another case of corporate interests begging for a handout when they want new yachts.
The problem is not giving certain packets a higher priority, the problem is who decides who gets higher priority and why.
But anyhow, it's pointless. The only bottleneck there is is the DSL uplink.
Once your packet is at your local ISP it will only go through relatively empty lines. Bandwidth is incredibly cheap these days. A simple pair of optical fibers can easily handle 10 GBit or 40 GBit.
Anyhow, if you are really worried about it: Get off your A** and build your own network. Wireless meshed networks are really simple to build.
The original article is by a paid market research firm, if this was a article about total cost of ownership for windows being less than that of *nix it would just be a joke.
from TFP : ...have built a business on the fundamental assumption of relatively low latency bandwidth being available...
The post says it all : if they built a business out of it, they have to pay for it. At least it's the motto of ISPs salivating for their piece of content providers' cake.
Seems that here, in Europe, ISP's didn't yet get a clue 'bout this.
Good news out of this anyway : corporations looking for revenue in another corporation's pocket instead of mine. Looks like a change of mind.
Net Neutrality refers to a neutral internet... the ISP's wouldn't be able to treat one type of packet different from another. The point the original article is making is that if net neutrality isn't protected, the only services (VoIP, gaming, video), that won't suffer will be ones that are either supplied by your ISP, or ones where the providers have paid your ISP extra. Hence, if you like XBox Live, and Microsoft hasn't paid Verizon (or AT&T, etc), your online games will suffer. If Microsoft has paid up with all of the ISP's, then you're in great shape. Suddenly it's a whole lot more difficult to provide content and services, unless you are the ISP.
Now that you know, the best way to make sure Joe Sixpack understands is to Spread the Word!
What, broadband providers don't have enough bandwidth?
Lay more fucking fiber, you god damned piece of shit greedmongering lazy bastards! I pay $110 for cable per month, and that ONLY includes analog, digital on ONE TV, and a cable modem. I have an HDTV, and I REFUSE to pay them another $10 for 8 760p.
Eat my shorts, telecoms.
(Note that my cable company is not a large one, and my modem's speed is routinely 1.5x advertized with no latency problems or blocked ports. Still, $110 a month??)
"Every Time You Vote Against Net Neutrality, Your ISP Kills a Night Elf". That's fine. I play Tauren. You seen one Legolllas, you've seen them all. (By the way, did every person who came to Wow with no sense of fantasy make themselves a night elf? What was the draw to that stupid race for most people, anyway?)
Likely situation: convergence of movie and gaming industries. The movie industry has the huge bankroll necessary to launch a game. Game producers will be sought after just as movie producers are, and game directors will be just as successful movie directors are now.
Mind you, I think that will happen even with network neutrality, but my point is: online-gaming will simply take it in stride if it happens.
I wonder what the implications of a strategically placed login message for World of Warcraft, with the names/ridings of the politicians against Net Neutrality.
Tell a WarCrack fiend he may have a high ping during that critical Patchwerk attempt then open a voting station on maintenance day. Voter turnout would probly spike by 3-4 million (current US wow base?) people.
If the people who had the most to lose(M$,google,Blizzard) made an effort to saturate every aspect of online entertainment with things like "facts" and "consequences" on the Net Neutrality debate this issue would become a huge pariah for more politicians. I mean who wants pasty faced basement dwellers emerging every tuesday to block you office entrance...or maybe a costumed Tauren hiding your water cooler with their bulk...etc.
Why does this only apply to online gaming? Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Net Neutrality, "an idealized concept of network design which has been defined by Tim Berners-Lee as "If I pay to connect to the net with a given quality of service, and you pay to connect to the net with the same or higher quality of service, then you and I can communicate across the net, with that quality of service.""
So, why aren't the VoIP telcos crying hoarse? What about companies that rely on video streaming? Why only online gaming? This story seems to me to be a plant just to get the average gaming geek up in arms.
I mean, if everyone suffers the same fate, isn't everyone else gaining as well? What's the problem?
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
If Net Neutrality did squeeze online gaming, it might create an opportunity for someone like GameRail, a high speed network that directly connects online game players to the servers that host popular FPS titles. GameRail peers directly with ISPs, universities and game server providers (GSPs). The question is whether game server hosts see usefulness in that type of middleman. The answer to that question might change in some of the scenarios imagined int eh article.
RichM
Data Center Knowledge
I'm confused... Do we have net-neutrality now? Why then can't anyone connect to my port 80, and why can't I connect to port 25 of anyone other than my ISP's mail server?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Let's say this comes to pass and that all real-time gaming grinds to a halt. What happens then?
The way I see it, it will force the MMORPG genre to the local level. I can imagine about 20+ or so people playing games like Diablo2 with one computer opting to host as the server. Or, maybe a game like WoW where the server runs at your ISP and all its members can connect to it.
It doesn't sound all that bad when you think about it. I personally would rather be playing an MMORPG with only local players from my city. Second, there wouldn't be an over crowding issue. Third, because they're local, I could actually meet them in real-life in a bar or something as a get-together and drink beers over it.
Life is not for the lazy.
I didn't think bottled water would sell too well either. Things that seem silly to knowledgeable and sane folks just don't sink in to the rest of the populace.
Right now I have 1.5Mb/256k ADSL from AT&T for $15 a month. The chuckleheads keep trying to sell me on "pro" service for twice as much, but in truth I hardly use the bandwidth I've got now, I'm happy with what I've got as long as they don't screw it up. Sooner or later they're going to key in on the fact that quite a bit of the demographic they've targeted is saturated for bandwidth and go after latency so they can ratchet up the price that way. That (I think) is what this tiering is all about..how to find another way to charge for the same things they sell now, without having to spend too much more on infrastructure.
Please, think of the night elves!
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
TFA (which I haven't read btw) seems to take the stance that the current setup allows for online games to receive higher priority than other traffic (which I doubt very much).
Hint: Don't reference "TFA" without reading it... I can understand if the summary confused you, but then you should have just referenced the summary
No, the article doesn't say gaming gets preference now, the article says there is no preference now. But if that changes and neutrality goes away, online gaming will be all but killed off, unlike VoIP and video. ISP's have alternatives to VoIP and video (and so do other non-internet sources, like land lines for phone and Video on demand service for video), but it's not likely that the ISP's will offer online gaming services, because they don't know anything about that whole industry. And even if they did try to offer it, it wouldn't be good, because it wouldn't be coming from the good game publishers.
So, to sum up, TFA says that gaming, like other internet services, will suffer due to latency problems. Unlike other services, there are not alternatives to online gaming, and a worse experience for a large segment of users upsets the rest of the users (if there are any who don't have latency issues) so the whole industry stands to be hurt badly by non-neutrality.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Confusion on this issue is rampant, even at Slashdot.
... [blah blah Night Elf blah blah]"
The Slashdot blurb says: "Any interactive communications could stand to take a dive (VOIP, streaming video, etc) with the advent of Net Neutrality legislation."
In other words, it's opposed to the passing of laws about this.
The actual linked article takes the opposite view. It envisions the same problems, but it says they will happen if we fail to pass a law. That's why it has the title "Every Time You Vote against Net Neutrality
Probably the submitter (and the Slashdot editor) believe in net neutrality, and think that they agree with the article, but somehow don't understand that the solution being recommended is to pass a law.
Certainly I favor the principle of net neutrality. But we seem to have effective net neutrality already. So far MMORPGs have been doing a booming business without the benefit of any kind of net neutrality legislation. I agree if ISPs start to deliberately introduce significant latency, it would be a problem for many online games, but it's not clear to me that they are planning to do anything like that. I am reluctant to screw around with a regulatory environment that already works.
If you look at RampRate's client list, they include several major players (Microsoft, Yahoo, etc.) who are in favor of net neutrality legislation. So in terms of personal testimony, this article does nothing to sway me.
I need some kind of fact-based argument that this law is really and truly necessary to prevent bad behavior from the ISPs. Until then, I'm agnostic on the subject, and so by default I'd oppose changes to the status quo.
...what about the impact this kind of thing would have on our society and economy as a whole? My whole livelihood and the livelihoods of many more like me are based around the idea that people with high-speed internet will be able to access web-based content at high speeds.
More than that, this tiered internet crap would effectively kill the internet's power as one of our greater equalizers (yes I know not everyone has access, but we'll get there). The internet as it stands brings down barriers to entry for businesses and gives us all a greater pool of knowledge to pull from.
I sure wish I had so much carefree leisure time to burn that the first thing I think of when I hear about this legislation is "OMGZ THE GAMEz!!1"
Damn, this is serious business now.
The idea is to pass legislation to prevent ISPs from doing something they aren't doing in any great numbers anyway in the absence of the legislation, presumably because we either suspect that they will begin doing what we don't want them to do or we just love legislation kind of in general and want more of it to be passed.
It has been done, here a little, there a little. It was an issue of discussion on the Vonage forum for a while. What I think is funny is that ISPs say "There's not evidence that we'll be non-neutral, so you shouldn't regulate us", then they turn around and say that neutrality prevents them from funding the growth of the Internet infrastructure... using astroturfing fake grass roots campaigns (how genuine). So how are they planning on funding that growth? If they really didn't plan on being non-neutral, how would neutrality prevent them from funding the growth of the Internet?
They give one answer (We haven't been non-neutral, and we don't think we will...) to one group, then turn around and give another answer (How else can we help the Internet grow?) to someone else, then they turn around again and complain about the "freeloaders" like Google, eBay and other content providers, even though those providers are already paying for the bandwidth they use. They basically have said that they will charge for priority, and that they won't, at the same time.
Considering that the Government is responsible for the creation of the Internet, I'd say the government ought to have some say about the neutrality of the Internet in this country.
You have a very twisted view. Let me put it too you bluntly.
Google, Microsoft, Download.com, and Slashdot ALREADY FUCKING PAY FOR THEIR FUCKING BANDWIDTH. That's why they have dedicated fiber lines running into their data centers. That's why we can access them.
Joe Sixpack, Grandma Jones, and Little Boy Blue ALREADY FUCKING PAY FOR THEIR FUCKING BANDWIDTH. That's why they have cable/dsl/regular modems that allow them to connect to their ISPs so they can surf the web. Its how they connect to Google, etc.
The telecos are already getting paid at both ends of the pipe. Now, they want to add a QoS layer to make Google and Grandma pay AGAIN, or else suffer degraded service. Or worse, intentionally degrading service to sites that may be in competiton to their services or displaying views/opinions that the teleco does not support.
If the telecos want/need to charge more for bandwidth, then charge more. This QoS crap borders on extortion: "That's a nice website you have there....be a shame if something were to happen to it."
~X~
~X~
It is not "money and greed" in this case, but, rather, an explosion of hijacked PCs sending spam. ISPs are right blocking SMTP port (other than to their own server) by default, although I agree, that they should be making exceptions for those, who explicitly ask for it enabled.
That said, this is a completely different subject from the one, with which I started the thread...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
limmit our bandwidth? We'll steal it from our neighbor's unprotected(or protected for that matter) access points. We're geeks. We're the new boogie men.
We fix your printers, we fix your fucking blackberries when they break. We guard your servers when you sleep. Do NOT fuck with us.
Um, no. That's not what TFA says. TFA says those thing are all threatened by the absence of net neutrality legislation.
Of course, TFA also says that gaming shouldn't really be threatened, because without net neutrality, ISPs are better off leaving gaming alone and taxing Google and monopolizing VOIP. (Though given the scale of the gaming industry, I can't see them not also taxing game servers as well as Google. It's a big pool of money, and if they have the legal power to demand a cut, they will.)
You are literally lying your pants off here. Net neutrality has nothing to do with pricing AT ALL -- AT&T can charge a dollar for internet access, or they can charge one hundred dollars, and there's nothing the government can do about it.
What Net Neutrality actually is -- well, it's a regulation on internet carriers that prevents them from deprioritizing packets based on what they contain. So AT&T cannot degrade my Xbox360 Live packets while letting PS3 packets through at lightspeed because Sony and AT&T have some shady backroom deal or AT&T wants to charge me a "gamer's fee" of 10 dollars on top of my internet access. BTW, I picked a deliberately ficticious example, but it's far more likely that AT&T would kill competing Voice-Over-IP systems rather than affect gaming - but you never know. What if they decide they want a piece of Amazon, or your online business? Prepare to fork over some cash.
Now there is always some free market nutjob who butts in at this point with some pithy line about how, "it's their internet, and they can do whatever they want". But the problem is that this is BS for a couple of reasons. The first is that it's not a free market; most people have 2 broadband providers IF THEY ARE LUCKY and they are both essentially local monopolies: the phone company, and the cable company. They don't have competition and can screw you blue if we lose Net Neutrality. The second thing is that it's not the free market, because you - as a taxpayer - have already subsidized the infrastructure of these companies. The government has granted the telecoms huge amounts of money to build infrastructure for the internet. You have granted them the use of right-of-way through your property to lay their cable and "make improvements". (A side note: Verizon is putting FIOS into my neighborhood, and they messed up the edge of my front lawn to do it; there's absolutely nothing I can do about it as this is considered an easement with the city that I still magically pay propery taxes on, of course.)
I believe in the power of the free market to solve many issues but the issue here is that we are talking about Net Neutrality, which deals with data. That data is the "currency" of the free market that is the internet and needs to be kept fluid and neutral.
Every Time You Vote Against Net Neutrality, Your ISP Kills a Night Elf
As a member of The Horde I will have to vote against net neutrality then.
The wet dream of these companies is to be able to set up the same sort of pricing system mobile phone carriers now enjoy. Charge for different types of usage. Charge a given fee for basic browsing and email. Want to download movies? Pay extra. Want to play online games? Pay even more. Go over your allotted bandwidth? You're going to be charged 50 cents for every Mb over your limit.
Companies are desperately seeking new ways to nickle and dime customers to the most ridiculous degree. So many companies today are so ravenous for money that they're actually hindering progress.
I'm all for the free market, but this isn't free market in action. This is companies trying to get legislation enacted which give some companies and unfair competitive advantage. Citizens are too uninformed and in this case would lack insufficient power to be able to effectively fight this.
I hate to say it but Cringely got it right and this article gets it wrong. Without net neutrality we move to spoke and wheel internet where the hubs are the high QOS cliques of the major carriers. all other paths joining nodes that are not in the intra-carrier cliques and thus getting first rank quality of service will be slow connections. As a result two things happen: the actual network capacity, compared to a peer-to-peer model goes down. and the number of players who can simultaneously be connected within one clique drops.
Now the providers like this. First, the guy with the biggest clique wins and it drives out the little guy competittion. Second, they don't care what your bandwidth is as long as they are the gate keeper and can charge you what it costs them plus a fixed profit. They have no strong incentive to build more bandwidth since as gate keepers their profit will be the same. It's not like there are suddenly be fewers internet users. As long as you can play some games you will be shelling out 49.99 per month--you wont decide well hey it's not fast enough so I wont use the internet at all. You'll still belly up. You might be willing to pay a premium for faster service, but unless all the other game players were willing to do so also then your speed limit in the game is not your connection but the connection to the other players on the slow links.
Now the way they can deliver better QOS to everyone is to maximally exploit all the interconnects they don't gate keep. Namley the the peer-to-peer connections that may span provider networks. If all those have high QOS there's more bandwidth for everyone. They just can't change you extra for it and since it allows competition and the small cliques can compete you are not slaved to one provider: you can move to the best value and still have good QOS. So there's incentive to the providers to provide faster and faster connetions at the lowest cost.
the article is exactly wrong
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Look at the server end: Online biz (especially big biz like gaming, maybe VoIP) will make bloody sure they've good good pipes. They pay kilobucks per month with negotiated service levels, and ping _will_ be good. They'll switch backbones to get it.
End users have less negotiation power, but significant numbers have a choice between DSL and cable. They compete rather firecely, and neither wants the stigma of being slower. Cable loves VoIP because it hurts their main competitor, the telcos.
The Internet is not a monolithic system. It is build and runs on choice. High ping will be interpreted as damage, and routed around.
From TFA:
he move will not be aimed at restricting usage per se, but rather to extract a fee from the game operator.
Or, from the end user.
Gaming will not die. Yes there will be a hiccup but within 3-5 years there will be a new normal.
If Net Neutrality fails and ISPs are free to treat different traffic differently, you can expect high-demand features like low-latency traffic to require a premium from either the end-user or some other sponsor, such as a game company or an advertiser.
You sort-of-kind-of have this already happening at the back-end, where sites like Yahoo and Microsoft ante up to make sure that almost every user can see them quickly no matter where they are, by using systems like akadns.
So, the gaming arguement isn't a great arguement for Net Neutrality. What is?
How about freedom of speech.
There are more important reasons for net neutrality. An ISP may block web sites of political opponents, labor unions, and the like if there is no legal protection. Likewise a small, privately-held monopoly ISP may block sexually oriented web sites just because the owner is morally against them.
Where there is little or no competition, which is the case in most cities with a single dominant telco and a single dominant cable provider, Net Neutrality is as necessary as Cable-TV's "must carry" rules or the longstanding "must carry" common-carrier rules that date back to the early days of AT&T.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
If you own or manage a website hosted by BlueHost.com (and perhaps other ISPs), you should check to see if Comcast is blocking access to it, apparently in some nasty, bullying power play to "get at" independent ISPs just as the Christmas buying season begins. Given their millions of subscribers, this could prove very costly for many web businesses.
My website is easily accessible through any other ISP, but since Tuesday morning Comcast has sending requests for it (and, I'm told, hundreds of other of small businesses) to a "blackhole nameserver" (192.168.2.1), deceiving users into believing it doesn't exist. G. K. Chesterton described this sort of behavior when he said that Germany's murdering of civilians in WWI Belgium was like a crazy man "who shoots dogs out of hatred of cats."
Comcast seems to have a similarly irrational hatred of something that's driving them to kill a lot of innocent websites. If you have contacts inside Comcast, pressure them to end this idiotic policy. If you have media contacts, get them to pick up the story. Comcast subscribers won't be happen to learn that Comcast is deceptively blocking their access to perfectly legitimate websites.
Vote against Net Neutrality, everybody, so those pesky purple skinned elves can go extinct.
FOR THE HORDE!
________
Entranced by anime since late summer 2001 and loving it ^_^
I'm all for the free market, but this isn't free market in action. This is companies trying to get legislation enacted which give some companies and unfair competitive advantage.
Actually, the free market would say that new ISP's would fill the void, offering good service at good prices. If there's money to be made in offering unfettered bandwidth at $xx, then somebody will do it, because demand will be there.
40+ hours a week? The horror!
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
If network neutrality harmed gaming, why isn't it hurting how?
Network neutrality means that you don't discriminate for or against packets based on origin or destination.
Your ISP should be free to discriminate with HTTP, BitTorrent, VoIP, and game traffic (for or against). Why? Because things like QoS are necessary to a properly functioning network... It's fine if HTTP is 500ms latency, not if VoIP is, so packets for time-critical services get priority (to a point). Your ISP should be absolutely forbidden from discriminating against HTTP traffic from Google because Google refused to pay protection money, because that is exactly what made the Internet great.
So, here it is: The Network Neutrality Act
1) No ISP, herein defined as an entity providing access to remote services ("The Internet") for a regular fee, shall be permitted to perform any form of Internet traffic shaping based upon the source or destination of said traffic.
2. Any ISP found in violation of this act shall be fined an amount equal to 2% of its entire last fiscal year's net revenue per day that it remains in contravention of this act.
I'd love to see the first ISP that tries discriminating after this... heh.
They already sell (on plenty of ISPs, Speakeasy pops to mind) gamer ADSL packages now which decent low-latency servers for a bunch of games.
Paying your extra dollars a month gets you a better experience. We ALREADY experience the effect
that a lack of Net Neutrality would get us, which is a-la-carte bandwidth options from our ISP
depending on what services we want to provide. ISPs already kill off bandwidth to newsgroups (but
not for their OWN news servers which you may have to pay extra for), throttle P2P or kick people off
their connection for any number of reasons.
Basically if they bring in the laws that kill net neutrality, nothing will change whatsoever. If
they don't bring in those laws, nothing will change whatsoever....
Hey, I know a simple way to ensure that "big tube providers" get a fair compensation (which will ensure the incentivization of "more, bigger, faster tubes" while still preventing innovative, small, budding companies from being service fee-ed into oblivion. Come out with a simple and reasonable rate sheet (should all fit on one page), and have it only apply to companies with over $10 million in gross revenue.
I think the TFA makes reasonably astute observations with respect to video's ability to use buffering to compensate for high latency. It is important to note that video is a broad term, and the importance of latency can and does vary depending on the kind of video. Video conferencing is a major challenge, because to achieve maximum quality it really does require high bandwidth and low latency simultaneously. However, there is a lot of video streaming that is only unidirectional, whether it be video on demand, or some kind of video broadcast, and in those cases, the TFA is quite right that even very large amounts of latency can be concealed with suitably designed buffering strategies. In that case, network jitter matters much less than bandwidth as far as the video is concerned (if the bandwidth just isn't there, then your video isn't going to be good).
Games are a bit different though. Most games need low latency, but compared to video, they also require a lot less bandwidth. This is important, because it opens a similar kind of opportunity to "work around" performance problems in the network. I would claim that the dominant source of delay in network games will be propagation delay (i.e. speed of light to cover physical distances traversed by the game packets). Yes, queueing delay in the network may be significant, but I doubt it will exceed the propagation delay. So my claim would imply that preferential treatment (away from the game traffic) will hurt games most when it causes some of the game packets to be dropped, possibly causing the game to cope with missing data, or longer latency (if the game reponds by retransmitting data). One simple approach is to send the packets redundantly (pro-active retransmission, FEC, etc.). This redundancy means that even if some of the packets get dropped, others may still get through. This will increase the overall bandwidth of the game traffic, but compared to other traffic (i.e. video) the amount will still be relatively low. Just like video, there may be certain types of game where this may not be feasible... if a game for some reason requires very high bandwidth, then its requirements will look a lot like video conferencing---it will need both high bandwidth and low latency. Almost none of the current games that I know of actually fall into that category.
Basicly, there are 2 things that I think ISPs should be forbidden from doing
1.They should be forbidden from discriminating on network packets based on source or destination address
and 2.They should be forbidden from limiting the physical bandwidth available to a given network protocol (blocking it e.g. port25 or virus ports is different and is perfectly ok, what I am talking about is the practice of port shaping so that e.g. BitTorrent is cut down so its effectivly operating on a slower link)
only because the ps2 is really only worth about $100. i used to be ps2 all the way until i saw the light, a glowing green light. sony had their day and screwed up royally. did everybody forget about the rootkits? just imagine whats going on in your ps3....
I haven't owned a console since the days of PS1. I just know that the 360 is a bigger flop than the PS3.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
This answers all problems.
savetheinternet.com
1 4/\/\ 1337
NOTICE: You can have "Free Pluralist Republic Net-Neutrality" or you can have "Plutocratic Corporate Communism Net-Nepotism", but under no circumstances will you have both!
...) will do to screw all of you and US.
THEREFOR: Government based on special interest politics, economics, and religion, then spiced with xenophobia of other dogmatic devils [AKA: HUMANS] has determined that a semiliterate elitist culture is better served by Net-Nepotism.
ALSO: Any opposition/objection by the many to the few Fiat-Rulers will be severely punished with "NO INTERNET ACCESS", and the number of years will be determined by severity of pluralist threat to the righteously privileged leaders. I think the DMCA and recent IPR patents/rulings/laws prove some of what the almighty (politicaians, corporatist, televangelist,
FINALLY: gOD BLESS aMERICA?
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Currently the net is generally "net neutral" If I send a packet anywhere it can travel to its destination and back at the speed the pipes allow at that moment. With some exceptions* this is true of all packets
Lately some ISP's (generally US phone companies who have some local monopolies) have started looking at the contracts and agreements and have discovered that they are not required by law/contract to stay neutral. They may also want to limit competition from Voice Over IP and Internet Video (not that they would admit that)
So what they have done is start talking about charging companies (like Google, myspace, ect) extra or they will slow down or even block packets to the companies
The "net neutrality" legislation would prevent this change from being legal. and keep the status quo. The lobbyists are all over this issue like flies/lies on s....
*exceptions: some ISP's block some packets for security purposes. this includes but is not limited to our going email (spam) and incoming web services
I really hope that he was also a student or something or else that's pretty sad. Maybe that's why US jobs get outsourced - the 40 hour work week is apparently unreasonable (not referring to your joke, but to the GP). Of course, I can't really complain since my current job is basically outsourced from the good old US of A :)
Nobody has made the elves getting stuck in the "series of tubes" joke, yet?
My roommate graduated from college with a degree in industrial design and spent the last six years working at a grocery store. He made enough money to get back on while working 20 hours a week at $16/hour USD. His wife-to-be was pissed off that his financial contribution to the wedding was insignificant since he had no savings and didn't like my teasing that she's chosen poorly. She changed that situation when they go married. He's working 40+ hours a week and looking for a better job now. If life doesn't give you a swift kick in the ass, a spouse can do a better job.
I guess my question about Net Neutrality: this would be an American law, so I'm guessing that the rest of the world would basically move forward while America did a really dumb thing once again? Given the importance of the internet in the world economy's future, it would seem to seal the deal of knocking the USA out of the running.
I have no idea why anyone would willingly make this move. It's braindead.
Then again, it could be a concerted effort by certain investors to move their money offshore where regulation isn't a problem. If that's true, however, then you could expect those places to adopt regulations a lot faster than otherwise. Where there's more money at stake, there's a greater incentive to regulate.
The USA would still have some money though, and consumers would still want to avoid bullheaded companies. The result would be a lot of new partnerships and new companies that provided service. It would kill the major providers today (unless they adapted). All they'd get is the short-term profits.
Whoever thought this up must have six months (or years) to live and a really mean streak. It won't take, but if it even comes off it will be a major pain in the ass. It'll turn the other way a lot faster than prohibition did, but even during prohibition the bandwidth (alcohol) still flowed plentifully.
Shrug.
They wouldn't take a dive, it just wouldn't get any better. They already exist, without Net Neutrality. On top of that, a lack of legislation would allow ISPs to charge online game providers for their bandwidth and decent latency. It ends up being a sort of "protection racket" where monthly fees get increased because ISPs realise they can milk that cash cow without any particular investment in it. This would also have a sizable impact on lower-population games (think anything with less than 200,000 subscribers, which constitutes a fair number of them), as increased subscription fees would drive some people away (particularly the younger crowd, who would be justifying the cost to their parents) and cut a fine line between a serviceable game and layoffs/closing down.
Right now the US is in a situation where they are no longer the "majority" of the tech elite. India, China, Brazil, Souoth Korea and others are fast moving from suppliers of the US pot to being able to just say "Screw the US, we don't need them." As we move forward onto a less neutral net the end result will be nothing less than a mass exodus of cutting edge technology from the US to other countries.
The EU, China, India all provide single currency markets that are larger than the US market, if not now then very soon. So the power the US market had won't last much longer. The question is if the US throws up too many barriers to the market will the market adjust or, just move on to greener, and easier to graze, grass.
With the loss of the technical edge in market, will it also result in a loss of technology development. To we finally become a market made up of people selling things to each other.
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
Hmmm, with exchange rate, that's nearly as much as my outsourced IT (not tech support, just to be clear) job. Maybe he's on to something :)
The Place for ISPs in Gaming is as a series of tubes
Terra Nova did this, what, 4 days ago? Nice to know slashdot is on the cutting edge of news.r y_time_you_.html
http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2006/11/eve
I have been involved with ISPs one way or another for something coming close to twenty years now, and so far, we've never needed legislation on this topic. In fact, we've done pretty well without it.
Most of the time, when people describe a proposed "net neutrality" rule, the rule they propose is something to the effect of "you may not discriminate against particular networks just because you feel they use a disproportionate amount of your traffic". So, for instance, I can't tarpit spammers, because that's discriminating against them on the basis of my perception of the value of their traffic. And if you don't think that's going to come up in court, please show in detail how your proposal could not be applied that way, and put your money where your mouth is by agreeing to cover the legal costs of any court battles people have to fight to maintain their filters.
I just don't see the upside here. It's a big buzzwordy crusade for something that sounds great until you actually apply it to real-world circumstances.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Because the government would have to define all those terms - in regulations! Thesy'd write 300 pages just to define "neutral". Then there would be legal disputes that generate thousands and thousands of pages of case law.
How many people really think government regulation would help the internet?
But if there is anything on the ballot marked "Check here to kill Night Elves", sign me up for that. I'll even donate some gold for the lobbying efforts.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.