Net Neutrality; A political issue that actually affects gamers

11:32 AM on 11.22.2006   |   Nex

8 comments

Tom Greenberg, the CEO of RampRate (a technological consulting firm), has written a fantastic article on a political issue that we at Destructoid are absolutely appalled by; Net Neutrality. 

The fight over Net Neutrality is a complex quagmire of political jargon designed to confused the average voter. Your ISP (and many others) are against Net Neutrality, because under a neutral Internet, the packets (chunks of data) that make the e-world go round are evenly distributed, no matter where they come from. Their idea is that they should be able to slow down information from certain sources based on whether or not fees have been paid by said sources. For instance, if Google wants you to be able to use their content properly, your ISP would like to be able to charge them money for it.

That's heinous enough in and of itself, but this issue is especially important to people who enjoy online games. The single most important factor in a good online game is the latency. If you are unable to communicate with the server or the other players as quickly as possible, your game is going to be less than fun. Your ISP would like to charge various game manufacturers for your ability to play online unhindered.

In the end it comes down to a case of corporate greed superceding the rights of average citizens. The question of whether or not the government is going to help the corporations is still up in the air, so perhaps you should find a way to tell the government to keep their hands off of your Gears of War matches. 

Hit the jump for moral outrage directly 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.

With the permanent barriers that the removal of net neutrality will erect for these uses, the worst-case scenario includes three waves of change:

• One or more mainstream ISPs will introduce excessive lag that will effectively prohibit their users from participating in online games. The move will not be aimed at restricting usage per se, but rather to extract a fee from the game operator. However, as the Cablevision and YES dispute of 2002 showed us, a fee disagreement between a cable company and content provider can effectively lock out the use of a popular service for over a year;
• As online gaming guilds, clans, and partners disappear into the rifts created in the Internet fabric, players that derive value from the community of the game rather than the playing experience per se will drop off. This vicious cycle of scarcity of users will lead to diminished enjoyment for existing users which will lead to still fewer users, until more games follow Asheron’s Call to oblivion;
• Hardcore users will write strongly worded messages to their ISPs, who will classify them as unreasonable malcontents using more than their share of bandwidth.

For those who think this cannot happen, here’s a recent example: For years before the Web as we know it existed, Usenet was a core part of the Internet landscape. It was a factory for online discussion, exchange of ideas, and, ultimately, one of the better bulletin boards for content of all shapes and forms. However, as the Internet became mainstream, Usenet users were marginalized (typically with “cease and desist” letters citing excessive use of “unlimited” internet packages). Their Usenet services were then unceremoniously dumped by their providers (AOL and Comcast being two of the more notorious).

Where there was a substitute for Usenet through services such as Google or BitTorrent, there is no close substitute for online gaming. Killing off these blossoming networks, with their own economies (potentially taxable when converted into real-world cash), would result in drastic, irreparable harm to consumers, technology developers, the economy and tax revenue – and even the ISPs themselves.

There are also a ton of other great reasons as to why we should prevent the ISPs and the big cable/telephone/TV conglomerates from screwing with Net Neutrality, as it will hinder literally everything you do on the Internet, but this one probably hits closest to home for you kids out there.