It seems that TerraNova has an infatuation with this report on net neutrality. The report – summarized very briefly – examines networking, Voice over IP, online gaming, ISP power, latency and much more, and eventually comes to the conclusion that online gaming is the most vulnerable potential casualty if net neutrality is lost. I.e., if ISPs are free to prioritize traffic as they wish, and potentially making latency for online games too high to endure. Read the report for more information; it’s a good read.

I have a few spontaneous comments to all of this…

1. Why is TerraNova being blocked at my job? I don’t get it. It allows all kinds of vile sites, but not this one. They must’ve had lots of porn once, but – alas – it’s all gone now.
2. Doesn’t the capitalist way work in the ISP case? As far as I know no ISP has a monopoly, and there would probably always be a lesser evil to choose from; an ISP that doesn’t throttle online gaming protocols for example. Of course, this would take time. Online games would suffer until the ISPs note what the market wants.
3. Speaking of online games… I used to play some Quake 2 now and then, but after that I’ve never bothered with any of these action-based games. But there are other online games. I used to play Freeciv some time ago, for example. And other strategy games after that. I really dislike this theft of the words online gaming, since it indicates that bad latency would be the downfall of all online games. It would only affect action-themed games!
4. The report mentions that “out of all the victims of the loss of net neutrality, online gaming is likely to be the most fragile and irreplaceable.” Very true (except for point 3 above); but maybe it’s due to an obvious reason: gaming is a relatively big industry, but is it big compared to enterprise businesses? VoIP is mentioned in the report as another technology that is highly dependent on low latency. But the two aren’t comparable: gaming is for home-consumers, while VoIP advocates come from huge corporations. The report says (under the subtitle For developers and publishers of online games) that “flexing some muscle as both big spenders and influences on the user is the optimal path for guarding the status quo,” but even if developers and publishers started flexing, they’d look like computer geeks next to the muscular mega corporation pressure coming from other places. (I find that simile rather amusing and fitting.)
5. A better solution might be to try to take advantage of the possible Quality of Service arrangements that might become available through enterprise pressure; ride on that wave instead of fighting an unnecessarily hard battle.

Of course, I could be wrong about the fourth point. I don’t have any reports or real facts to back it up. And point five is vague as well: VoIP support is still rather sketchy, so who knows what improvements will happen there – and if they’ll only happen within corporate networks. But hey, I’m just tossing out my opinion here!

This entry was posted on Monday, November 20th, 2006 at 12:13 pm and is filed under Networks, Observations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.