Read this:
http://www.ramprate.com/marketcommentary/neutrality.html
We gamers will need to mobilize when Congress starts their next session in February. Last session over 800,000 signatures where received from people wanting to maintain net neutrality but it is expected that we will need to make that level of effort again this year.
http://www.ramprate.com/marketcommentary/neutrality.html
Commentary on Net Neutrality wrote:What Will Die
What will be murdered with no fallback or replacement is the nascent market of interactive entertainment â 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 â even overwhelming â portion of the value of these offerings comes from their ânetwork effectsâ â 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 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 Asheronâs 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.
For those who think this cannot happen, hereâs 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 âcease and desistâ letters citing excessive use of âunlimitedâ internet packages6). Their Usenet services were then unceremoniously dumped by their providers (AOL and Comcast being two of the more notorious).7
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 cash8), would result in drastic, irreparable harm to consumers, technology developers, the economy and tax revenue â and even the ISPs themselves.
We gamers will need to mobilize when Congress starts their next session in February. Last session over 800,000 signatures where received from people wanting to maintain net neutrality but it is expected that we will need to make that level of effort again this year.