Net Neutrality and online gaming

In this article, entitled "Every Time You Vote against Net Neutrality, Your ISP Kills a Night Elf," a sharp analyst tackles what the loss of Net Neutrality could mean for online gamers. Net Neutrality is the idea that your ISP sends you the packets you ask for as well as it can. A non-neutral net is one where ISPs take bribes to make some services better and degrade the rest.

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 us4, 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 oblivion5;

* Hardcore users will write strongly worded messages to their ISPs, who will classify them as unreasonable malcontents using more than their share of bandwidth.

Link (via Wonderland)

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