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."

FUD and Fear-mongering...

[mi]

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)...

Re:Does anyone even understand "net neutrality"?

[Aadain2001]

I am so with you on this!! People seem to be using the "Net Neutrality" boogyman to push their own agendas, even if those agendas are completely contradictory! For example, 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). Under Net Neutrality, everything would run at the same speed, irregardless of available bandwidth capacity and latency. But I always thought Net Neutrality meant 'keep things the way they are', ie, don't let Comcast and Verizon charge extortion fees to companies like Google to prevent their outbound traffic from being given the bandwidth and latency of a 3600 baud modem while giving their own offerings the highest level of priority possible.

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.

Re:Does anyone even understand "net neutrality"?

[Hijacked Public]

There is a Wikipedia entry for it, if you trust such things to be correct.

And as far as I can tell the summary agrees with your first guess at the meaning of Net Neutrality. 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.

Clear?

Paid market "research" firm anyone?!

[phantomcircuit]

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.

Re:Does anyone even understand "net neutrality"?

[Truman Starr]

Net Neutrality is the "good" thing. Net Neutrality means that the Providers Of The Tubes cannot prioritize (i.e., charge more) for one type of traffic or destination than another. That is to say, if all of the users on an ISP spend their days watching YouTube, a Net Neutral ISP can't do much about it. The ISPs would like to be able to throttle down some traffic unless they get paid. So suddenly, you have all these people trying to watch YouTube, but the ISP is artificially choking the access. Priority is given to people downloading Fur or something. This would in turn frustrate users (except the furries) and drive them away from the "restricted" areas of the Net.

I'm sure that lots of nice arguments have been made in Congress. VoIP, for example, is a case where generally you want prioritization. You don't want your Vonage 9-1-1 call to be stuck because your kid is raiding Molten Core.

Re:Does anyone even understand "net neutrality"?

[smilindog2000]

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?

Re:FUD and Fear-mongering...

[jamie]

The FCC has made it clear that banning certain types of traffic -- as at least one ISP has already tried -- won't be tolerated. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality#Legal_ history [wikipedia.org]

Read the article...

[norminator]

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.

Re:the meaning of the word "gaming"

[MBraynard]

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.

Re:Does anyone even understand "net neutrality"?

[alanQuatermain]

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:

Let's assume the that Google leases its internet connection from Bell, and that there are a large number of consumers using AT&T DSL service to access Google.

So, AT&T looks at its traffic, and realises that they are routing a lot of traffic from their customers to Google, and routing the replies back again. They send someone to Google, asking for money. Google tells AT&T that it already pays some ridiculous amount of money for its internet connection (say, $250'000 per month), and is not going to pay AT&T. Neither will it pay Comcast or Rogers, who over the last week have also asked for large amounts of money.

AT&T (and Comcast, and Rogers) go back to their HQ and tune their Quality-of-Service so that Google's traffic is slowed down significantly. Now only Bell customers can access Google at the speeds for which Google is paying 3 million dollars a year.

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

ISPs and double-talk

[norminator]

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 [handsoff.org]... 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 [wikipedia.org] of the Internet, I'd say the government ought to have some say about the neutrality of the Internet in this country.

Re:No, free market lowers prices

[Xyrus]

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~

Its A Trap! Arguement goes AGAINST N-N

[davidwr]

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.

Re:FUD and Fear-mongering...

[Barny]

Correct, this is how my ISP does it, if you want your port 25 + windows networking ports opened, you go onto their website, and use the drop down box to select "open the floodgates" or something similar, about 5 min later they are open.

Protects customers who don't need to know, and keeps customers who do :)

Re:Does anyone even understand "net neutrality"?

[VGPowerlord]

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.

Re:Does anyone even understand "net neutrality"?

[ACMENEWSLLC]

Great post alanQuatermain (840239).

I agree. I am against any legislation here though. I currently QoS about 700 users traffic. We prioritize based on just about everything. An .EXE in FTP/HTTP traffic gets lower priority than a Citrix session for example. But they both can fill the pipes if they need to. SMTP has a cap limit so it can not fill the pipe. It also has a low QoS. HTTP traffic in general is lower priority than HTTPS traffic. ISO downloads are capped at 90% and QoS very low. Certain web sites have bandwidth caps and/or low priority while some websites have high priority.

That is what I do. It works very well. I can share a limited resource and get much better utilization out of it. Why shouldn't ISP's be able to do the same thing?

They should not, however, expect me to pay if I am not their customer. Now say I want to pay them to get my website to have priority. I have no problem with that. But how can they quantify these results to me? How can I to myself?

My ISP limits bandwidth on certain ports. Many block certain ports. Some cap certain websites. I have no problem with this. I would much better see priority throttling over bandwidth limits, but thats my opinion. I'd rather my ISP limit my bit torrent downloads so my BF2 doesn't lag. Works for me.

WTF is the blurb talking about?

[The Master Control P]

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.

Re:Does anyone even understand "net neutrality"?

[Qzukk]

it gets there with the same priority as yours or anyone's

you can discriminate against BitTorrent, gaming traffic, spam, video, etc

Unless you're name is John C. BitTorrent, it's not a contradiction. Your BitTorrent traffic will get there with the exact same priority as his BitTorrent traffic. Your spam will get there with the exact same priority as his spam. But your BitTorrent may end up a lower priority than your spam email, because of what it is, not who you are.

Re:the meaning of the word "gaming"

[Nematode]

"This is a nation where a loudmouthed lawyer can file a lawsuit to prevent a game from being sold, on the basis that it would unleash a generation of "school shooters", even though the closest thing to a firearm in the game is a spud gun. " ...and it's also a nation where that lawsuit gets unceremoniously bounced out of court, without stopping anything from being sold.

The nation may be undereducated, but Jack Thompson's mania is not evidence thereof.