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End of Net Neutrality and End of Free to Play
Andravius
Member UncommonPosts: 82
Looks like Verizon will get their way and end the FCC's power to ensure net neutrality, so we are possibly looking at bundling like the cable does with channels, so ftp mmorpgs might cost a monthly 10$ to N$ to play if the ISP's decide they want to get in on the revenue stream of the game or face a artifically slowing of access to the game servers.
I don't think the online gaming companies will have a say in this because the ISP's can strong arm them by not allowing access to their servers, so the ISP's can set up any rate they want to access the game servers.
The paranoid side of me thinks that is why the online game companies went to free to play. They've anticipated this and now will probably share in that monthly fee with the deniability of "What?!! Its not us but the dirty ISP's that's charging you". Their silence on this matter either means they knew this would happen or that they are totaly ignorant on this matter which is hard to believe.
I don't think their's enough competition out there for the free market to work. Once Verizon puts this in place, I'm 100% sure all isp's will do this. The greed is too much for any company to pass up and with no choice or little choice of access to the internet the consumer is screwed.
Of course on the flip side, the end of net neutrality with its increase of revenue to the isp's/cable companies might increase innovation in the market with new products coming from the big corportations out there. It might be a good tradeoff for losing the right of free speech on the internet.
Comments
It's not at all certain that Verizon is going to get what they want. One of the possible outcomes is that Net Neutrality is maintained on land lines, but not on wireless networks.
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-09-09/net-neutrality-goes-on-trial-a-guide-to-verizon-v-dot-fcc
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
What nonsense. Has any ISP, anywhere in the world, ever shown an inclination to charge extra for playing MMORPGs as opposed to other content? It's not like they've never wanted to throttle back anything; they have gone hard after file sharers at times. But ISPs love online gaming, precisely because it doesn't use much bandwidth.
Now, file sharers should worry, and it wouldn't surprise me if ISPs go after video streaming, since that eats up a ton of bandwidth. But MMORPGs? If ISPs weren't inclined to do that 10-15 years ago, when a given amount of bandwidth was far more precious, then why start now?
I don't really see it working that way.
I can see ~some~ services getting throttled. Netflix, for instance. If your on Comcast Cable, I can see not being able to watch Netflix at 1080p (unless your on some "Premium Package")... but having no trouble with, say, YouTube or Comcast On-Demand.
And that having nothing to do with your bandwidth, but totally with Comcast having cut a deal with Google, but seeing Netflix as competition, so they throttle network traffic to that domain.
I don't see games getting in big on this. They have very little to do with Telecom in the first place, they are low bandwidth in the second place, and out of all things to be monetized on the internet, gaming subscriptions are very low revenue stream.
Now, if they could do something like inject advertising into your online game - that may be annoying (and profitable)... I know SOE was toying with something like this for PS1 (they had billboards in the major city areas for a while), I haven't really seen it anywhere else though. But that could happen regardless of net neutrality.
I am very worried about net neutrality. Normally, I would say the market will correct; and if you are on an ISP that is throttling/doing other malicious things, you could just change your ISP. But in too much of the country (and world), there isn't a lot of choice for ISP: you get maybe 1 wired choice (and often that's the only high speed connection), maybe 1 wireless that isn't nearly as good of an option, and past that it's dialup or satellite.
But that would require congress to actually get something done if the worst does happen.....do you really want to rely on that given the current state of congress?
For some reason, the government keeps letting the ISP's think they own the hard lines and backbone, even though we tax payers have paid for it.
ISP' have been testing new payment models to mirror what countries like Japan have. No longer will we have unlimited bandwith.
Roses are red
Violets are blue
The reviewer has a mishapen head
Which means his opinion is skewed
...Aldous.MF'n.Huxley
^this. And the only reason th spam act passed in 2003 is because those ad agencies didn't bribe enough politicians, or pay them enough.
With ISPs, it's about control and power and revenue. You can bet no act would make it through congress to limit 'nickel and diming' as long as for every dime the ISP made, a nickel went to a congressman.
By looking at which side supported an open free net, we can not expect any regulation or bill to give us true net neutrality.
Roses are red
Violets are blue
The reviewer has a mishapen head
Which means his opinion is skewed
...Aldous.MF'n.Huxley
Playing a game utilizes little bw. But when you patch or download games and downloaded content is all the rage, thats when your talking about chewing up the bw. It happens quite often and with next gen consoles now pushing even harder for digital sales, you can bet greedy ole ISP's want a share.Unless you count downloading the games MMOs are not massive datahogs on ISPs. So I am not sure how they could justify it unless they do it "because they can"
most of the bandwith cost from gaming companies is paid to datacenters who then have peering/ bandwith aggreements with bandwith providers. I am not sure those can just be changed on a whim.
No doubt they would try this in other areas but I am not sure online gaming would be one of them.
Why wouldn't they? What evidence do we have that companies AREN'T greedy? Now you may hope they don't afix a 'gaming' service fee to your monthly bill, but that's wishful thinking in my opinion.
What makes you think that the only ones against net neutrality are the ISPs?
If something could theoretically be used for good or for evil, and doesn't seem to be used for much of either at the moment, I'm not philosophically inclined to rush to ban it.
And yes, net neutrality could theoretically ban some very good things. Suppose that ISPs were to figure out a way to optimize games for latency rather than throughput, while optimizing large downloads for throughput rather than latency. That could make both perform better at zero cost to anyone. Net neutrality would ban that.
I'm not saying that such optimizations are on the horizon. But there are an awful lot of ways that one could theoretically make things better by treating different types of traffic differently. That, so far, simply having more bandwidth available in total tended to overwhelm the effects of such optimizations doesn't mean that that will always be the case.
So long as the debate is weighing mostly hypothetical goods and evils, the ISPs aren't going to be all alone on one side. Of course it's hard to push something through congress when a ton of people are against it; it's supposed to be hard.
But if ISPs were to make themselves obnoxious by throttling anything and everything, then the debate would be between hypothetical goods and very real evils, and the ISPs would soon find themselves pretty much all alone. Just like the spammers did in 2003, which is why only 5 people in congress voted against the CAN-SPAM Act.
Here's the problem, it's not a question of bandwidth but of marketshare and profit. Let's say EA pays TimeWarnerCable X dollars to prioritize it's network traffic and deprioritize it's competitor's network traffic. In today's market, who knows how much stock Comcast might hold of some gaming studio, and throttle it's competitors?
When it comes to video streaming, again same thing, not a question of bandwidth but rather the connections between ISP and various media companies. TimeWarnerCable is a no brainer. The bandwidth Netflix uses doesn't cost them money, but the money Netflix customers pay Netflix might be theirs if TimeWarner launches a competing video streaming service.
Etc...
Well of course companies are greedy. So are consumers. So are governments. So are most other groups of humans. That's not news.
But what would be the advantage of nickle and diming people with surcharges for 10 or 20 different things on every bill rather than just raising the base rate? Charge people separately for every little thing and people will focus mostly on the charges they do pay and not much on the ones they don't. That would manage to convince most customers that the ISP is discriminating against them in particular. Going out of your way to make customers hate you more than necessary, and without even extracting extra profit from them in the process, is not a sound business plan.
That's precisely why ISPs don't do that already. Remember that the regulations in question weren't implemented until 2011. Returning to the ISP regulations of 2010 doesn't strike me as some sort of cataclysm.
How would that be zero cost? It would cost the ISPs money for R&D teams to solve that issue. The issue then becomes how do the ISPs monetize that advancement, or alternatively is it worth the R&D expense when it is far easier to stick with a standard model of billing for tiered bandwidth.
You see to have a naive belief that companies will do what is best for the public good rather than what is best for their bottom line. Hint: These two are often at odds in the corporate world.
Have you eaten today? Where did you get the food? If you bought it, was it from someone who wanted to be nice to you? Or was it from someone who thought he could make money by selling you food? Most likely, you've eaten food today that was at least partially prepared by people who have never heard of you and don't care about you in the slightest one way or the other. Yet they prepared food that you would eat because it was in their own interest to do so.
The same is true of nearly any other voluntary exchange. Most of the things that you can buy, you can buy because people who don't know you exist found it profitable to play some role in making various goods and services available to you.
Of course businesses aren't charities. I never said otherwise. But when they depend on customers voluntarily buying their products, they have to give you something of value to get your money.
Now, there is less competition among ISPs than in a lot of other markets. But the threat of competition matters, too. If an ISP decided to charge $200/month for a simple broadband connection in a big city, some other company would be able to move in and set up their own ISP that charges less.
Further, regulations usually do far more to stifle competition than to promote it. If regulations made it very hard to start your own ISP, then existing ISPs would be able to get away with a lot more without the threat of someone else coming in and offering a better service for a lower price. Some regulations are necessary, but let's not be in a huge hurry to ban anything and everything that could theoretically be abused.
It's crazy how hard people try and fight against free to play mmos. They're going to put a new tax on fruit...apples are fruit...apple makes computers....computers run free mmos...this tax is going to end free to play!
I'm not against free to play. This isn't an argument against free to play. Its about possible greed/revenue(depends on your viewpoint) by the isps to squeeze even more money out of the consumer.
"Net Neutrality" is one of the current rules that makes the internet work the way it does.
The problem is that the rules aren't law, even though the rules have been enforced by government agencies in most countries (the FCC in the US)
Here's the (mostly right) wikipedia article on it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality
Honestly if this kind of thing occurred I think we would start having country wide intranets. Its not something I would put up with.
The cost saving would be very advantageous for all the other providers if they changed their peering and laid their own fiber down. I live in Canada and I can tell you I would not submit to being forced to pay Verizon indirectly just because they decided to be epic douchebags. I simply would not play said game.
National Intranets may be the future if the US/Verizon flushes itself down the shitter. We may need to re-examine how the internet is built and do it again.
Probably should make it where isps can only be carriers and not content providers. Cable companies want to make their pipes available for only their net content and not others which causes problems for us because we want everything to be available.