Every Time You Vote against Net Neutrality, Your ISP Kills a Night Elf(part one)

Synopsis The debate over net neutrality1 has often focused on video as the dominant medium that made the prioritization of packets either crucial or harmful. However, video is not the offering that will suffer the most if net neutrality becomes a wistful memory. Rather, the users that are likely to be most materially disadvantaged are those that utilize the Net for interactive communications – particularly voice over IP (VOIP) and online gaming. Of these two finalists for the dubious title of “innovation most likely to be stifled to the detriment of everyone by loss of net neutrality,” gaming is by far the more irreplaceable and senseless loss. Unlike video and voice, ISPs are unlikely to have or be able to obtain a viable material stake in the gaming business and have no replacement for the service. As a result, consumers stand not only to lose their choice of the source of this product, but the very value of the gaming service itself.

What Will Live The battle over net neutrality is really a battle for latency (and jitter). It is unlikely that an ISP will make the mistake of repeating Canadian ISP Telus’ attempt at outright censorship2. Rather, the ISP’s gentle nudge towards the preferred offering or provider is likely to come in the form of slow and inconsistent network performance for services that refuse to pay what amounts to “protection money” to an ISP. Contrary to popular opinion, latency will not kill online video. After all, while a video that buffers for a longer period of time (or requires an advance download) is an inconvenience, it is one with which we coexisted not too long ago, and does not prevent the viewer’s eventual enjoyment of the sought-after experience. In a fit of poetic justice for the converged content provider / ISP, latency and jitter may even drive users from semi-legitimate streaming services with some minimal respect for copyright (e.g. YouTube) to download-focused sources that publicly mock infringement notices (e.g. The Pirate Bay3). This being said, latency and jitter will kill VOIP as we know it. While this is a Bad Thing for anyone not selling voice over copper, out of all the evils that can come out of the loss of net neutrality, it is the most easily remedied. Traditional means such as landline (including phone cards to reach VOIP networks closer to the backbone) or cellular will remain available, enabling voice communications to carry on, albeit at inflated rates. If the worst consequence of giving ISPs the leeway to abuse a monopoly power is several dollars out of our collective pockets, then we will have escaped easily.

What Will Die 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 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.

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 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 – and even the ISPs themselves.

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