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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."
The whole scheme is just badly defined, by both sides, and it is really hard to fight the FUD when the FUD seems to take on new shapes (but keeps the same names) depending on the source and their agenda.
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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.
Just to clear this up a bit, there are now two common definitions for "Net nuetrality". The original definition, which has been enforced since the early days of the net is:
- Carriers will not discriminated against data based on who sends it.
This simply means that my bits have just as much right to reach your DSL customers as Microsoft's. Under this traditional definition, network traffic shaping is legal: you can discriminate against BitTorrent, gaming traffic, spam, video, etc. Traffic shaping is a critical component of running a network well.
The new definition is total BS created by the phone and cable companies. They've redefined our traditional term to mean:
- You wont be able to pay more for high-bandwidth connections, or less for low-bandwidth. All customers will pay exactly the same rate.
This stupid FUD is unfortunately working. By redefining our term, they have turned it into an evil thing, which no one wants. Who would vote in favor of making cheap low bandwidth connections illegal?
Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
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.
The gambling lobbying/policy efforts have been trying to re-brand their business as 'the gaming' industry rather than 'the gambling' industry. It's not the legislators fault that 90% of the stuff they have to deal with and lobbyists they here from are from the 'gaming' as in gambling industry. You need to be aware of these things to get the results you want.
The thing most folks are concerned with is the ability for a network provider to request money from someone with whom they currently have no business relationship, and to penalize anyone who doesn't pay up. Here's an example:
Now, the government is currently trying to enact legislation which will make the above possible. The supporters of the Net Neutrality movement argue that the rules should stay as they are: we've not needed explicit rules before, we shouldn't be adding them now. The opponents of the movement argue that network companies shouldn't be stopped from using Quality-of-Service in their offerings. Now, there were some important points there:
Firstly, the existing legislation is effectively in favour of Net Neutrality; it doesn't grant any privileges which aren't intrinsic to the operation of the system as a whole. There is new legislation being created which changes that, however, and that new legislation is what people are trying to get rid of, to keep the existing level playing field.
Secondly, you see the argument that Net Neutrality shouldn't be allowed because then Bell won't be able to charge more for higher bandwidth, or for better quality of service, and so on. This is a red herring, however: Net Neutrality supporters don't much care about that. We don't expect that everything will cost the same. It's perfectly acceptable to us that any consumer -- be they private or corporate -- desiring higher access speeds or better quality of service would pay extra for that. It's a service, you pay for it. That's fine. What we don't like is the way that a company like AT&T or Comcast could potentially charge money from any company whose data crosses their network at any point.
So, if an AT&T customer uses Google, they would ask Google for money. The AT&T customer is already paying them, and is getting exactly what they paid for. Google is paying their provider, and getting what they paid for. Some network providers, however, believe that data crossing their network is not being paid for, and so should be able to request reimbursement from the content providers. At which point one might well ask: What are the consumers of AT&T's home DSL service paying for, if not for their traffic to be routed across AT&T's network?
The arguments come thick & fast, but it ultimately comes down to something similar to that employed by Universal against the iPod and (successfully) the Zune: These people make money by selling something which works alongside our product. Even though we're paid for our product, we want money from the device our product works with, because without our product, the device couldn't function.
So, I hope this clears things up for you: charging your customers extra for better QoS is not a problem. Charging people who aren't your customers for QoS -- or explicitly lowering QoS for companies who don't hand you money -- is not. We're not asking the government to create rules disallowing it, we'd just like the new rules enabling that behaviour to be removed please, or at least re
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."
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OK, this argument is confusing because the grandparent forgot to mention that the Telecoms are currently restricted from discriminating against companies because of their common carrier status. Current legislation means to change that, though.
In other words, Supporters != screw Google. Supporters are OK with traditional type-based QoS. Meaning that, if they want to screw Google, they have to screw all HTTP web traffic. Which is pretty much everything not using secure pages.
You will note, however, that this doesn't actually save MMO companies because they use unique ports.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
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.