Online Gaming Could Be Stalled by Net Neutrality Repeal, ESA Tells Court (arstechnica.com)

Posted by msmash on Thursday April 5, 2018 @07:20AM from the fighting-back dept.

A video game industry lobby group is joining the lawsuit that seeks to reinstate net neutrality rules in the US, saying that the net neutrality repeal could harm multiplayer online games that require robust Internet connections. From a report: The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) yesterday filed a motion for leave to intervene so that it can support the case against the Federal Communications Commission. The lawsuit, filed by a mix of Democratic state attorneys general, tech companies such as Mozilla, and consumer advocacy groups, seeks to reverse the FCC's December 2017 vote to eliminate net neutrality rules. The ESA said its members will be harmed by the repeal "because the FCC's Order permits ISPs to take actions that could jeopardize the fast, reliable, and low-latency connections that are critical to the video game industry."

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This seems entirely backwards..... by geschbacher79 · 2018-04-05 07:36 · Score: 3, Interesting

I would prefer my ISP to prioritize gaming traffic ahead of other traffic: Youtube / Netflix / Facebook / bittorrent don't have the same latency requirements as online games. In fact, it makes sense to me that gamers should prefer a net neutrality repeal because it would now allow prioritization of that.
With complete net neutrality, traffic isn't supposed to be discriminated against when in fact it is a situation like this where it makes sense.
The counter-argument is "OH well, this will force ISPs to invest in improving network connections for all content", etc, etc. But that confuses ping latency with bandwidth.