How does Net Nutrality affect SE/XIV?

[Claviusnex]

Unless ISPs are going to throttle your net to dialup speeds, you won't see a difference in FFXIV gameplay. The game literally uses a mere few kb/s to run. That's for gameplay. Patches may need to be smaller and less frequent. As bandwidth limits and speeds will make content patches unviable, requiring us to buy expansions via hardcopy again like we did for Early WoW and EQ.

The throttling we are talking about is not on your individual connection it is on the backbone side where the content provider connects.

[Senliten]

Lessee here... 2015, we were right in the middle of HW, weren’t we? I’m gonna guess that the game’s performance will behave as it did around then.

I mean, I see all kinds of articles saying that certain sites could be throttled or blocked, but I can only think of two occasions where that happened: Verizon was caught throttling torrents a few years ago, but to be fair, the primary purpose of those torrents was piracy, and Comcast was bullying Netflix into paying more so they wouldn’t get throttled. Comcast always have been shameless dirtpigs though.

Left one out, People of the State of NY vs TWC
Which oddly enough, involved Riot games as one of the Plaintiffs.

Just gonna uhh.. leave this snippet from This court summons here on why this is big deal for all of us, and no not just Leauge players.

329. It was not until Riot Games agreed to pay Spectrum-TWC for access to its
subscribers, that Spectrum-TWC agreed to connect its ports to Riot Games. Prior to this,
Spectrum-TWC deprived its subscribers of reliable access to online content as promised.

This line alone, explains just why people are fighting to keep NN in place, and what can happen with it no longer being around.

[Chortle]

I can see an ISP try to pull what you are stating within the USA, and get reamed for it. Ever since we could have access here to the internet here in the USA, you just paid for bandwidth. I can’t see this being changed unless an ISP wanted to commit suicide.

Regional monopolies give some of us little choice. I absolutely loathe my current ISP because of constant price increases for the same service year after year. There are no other high-speed options in the vast majority of my state so I am stuck with this money-grabbing company that hasn't had adequate competition in years.

Funny enough, they are one of the main backers of the FCC repealing Net Neutrality.

There is no suicide for the company to commit because there are no options for us as consumers. The could do whatever they wanted. Our options would be to fork over the cash or have terrible internet.

[Fhaerron]

The world is going to end tomorrow!

You were able to play before 2015 .. yes?

At most the sub prices of streaming services like Netflix will increase (and mmo's like this too).

QQ-ing here is not going to do anything about it, best is to let your local authorities and stuff know you are unhappy and I've also heard that 20 states (might be more by now) have this so joined forces and are against go support them!

[MaloraYuki]

The world is going to end tomorrow!

You were able to play before 2015 .. yes?

At most the sub prices of streaming services like Netflix will increase (and mmo's like this too).

QQ-ing here is not going to do anything about it, best is to let your local authorities and stuff know you are unhappy and I've also heard that 20 states (might be more by now) have this so joined forces and are against go support them!

Or you will see companies start to bundle internet like cable. The you could play before 2015 is bullshit that doesn’t stop Internet providers from being greedy and wanting more money. This whole thing is about greed nothing else, Companies wouldn’t care if there wasn’t a way they could profit off of it. However, You are right about no point in complaining on here and go join the effort, no one is going to check the ffxiv forums for your thoughts on the subject.

[Zojha]

Regional monopolies give some of us little choice.

Am I the only one who finds it ironic that this is an issue in the US of all places? <.<'

The USA, the "Land of Competition", propagating "Free Markets" across the world... has regional monopolies. For someone across the ocean not intimately familiar with the situation, that sounds somewhat odd.

[Chortle]

QQ-ing here is not going to do anything about it, best is to let your local authorities and stuff know you are unhappy and I've also heard that 20 states (might be more by now) have this so joined forces and are against go support them!

Informing others is always beneficial even if it is through a video game forum. I find it is crucial information especially for gamers to be made aware of.

Contact your state representatives: https://www.house.gov/representatives#state-alabama

Contact your state senator: https://www.senate.gov/general/conta...nators_cfm.cfm

Keep track of their votes!!

Make sure they know that their job is on the line with this vote. Their job is to be the voice of the people. The VAST majority of consumers do not want to repeal Net Neutrality.

[Claviusnex]

Am I the only one who finds it ironic that this is an issue in the US of all places? <.<'

The USA, the "Land of Competition", propagating "Free Markets" across the world... has regional monopolies. For someone across the ocean not intimately familiar with the situation, that sounds somewhat odd.

Most American companies are only for "Free Markets" as long as there is no competition. The reality is they all rather be monopolies where they can freely control their market.

[Xtrasweettea]

Regional monopolies give some of us little choice. I absolutely loathe my current ISP because of constant price increases for the same service year after year. There are no other high-speed options in the vast majority of my state so I am stuck with this money-grabbing company that hasn't had adequate competition in years.

Funny enough, they are one of the main backers of the FCC repealing Net Neutrality.

There is no suicide for the company to commit because there are no options for us as consumers. The could do whatever they wanted. Our options would be to fork over the cash or have terrible internet.

Hi, Xtrasweettea who is an ISP shill* here to respond!

Two reasons for monopolies:
1) Regional (whether it be city, county, or state) governments allow them to happen. Those governments accept money from the ISPs, whether they be campaign contributions or paying taxes/fees to have their lines operating in that region.
2) Because they are “utilities” you can only have so many lines, switching stations, and routing stations within an area. Your local monopoly may happen to own all of the hardware and lines in the region. If no one else had set up that hardware or lines within the region, then there is no real competition. If another ISP wants to operate on those lines (example, Comcast being able to operate on AT&T lines and switching stations), then that ISP has to pay to do so. This is no different than how things work with the electric company. I bet you don’t have choices to which electric company you can purchase power from. The same concept with the Internet.

As for your last statement, yes, it is suicide if a company within the USA to try do those tiered based packages. Those types of plans work in countries and regions that do per-bit internet services instead of per bandwidth like here in the USA.

As for forking over more cash, well that is the crux of Title 2 of NN isn’t it?

What seems like a fight between “the people” and the ISPs is really a fight of corporation versus corporation. It’s ISPs versus .com companies (Facebook, Google, Pornhub, Neflix, etc.). As someone who actually deals with these .com companies at a business level, they are really greedy and selfish. They do not want to pay for the traffic they create for their services. The amount packets and sizes of the packets can actually bog down networks. The traffic Pornhub alone in 2016 was massive:

A petabyte is equal to 1024 terabytes, or a million gigabytes, which means a whopping 3,110,400,000 GBs were used. That’s enough data to fill 194 million 16GB USB sticks. End-to-end, they would span all the way around the moon. By contrast, only 1,892 petabytes were used in 2015.

http://observer.com/2017/01/pornhub-stats-data-2016/

That is one company’s data usage for only one function of their company in one year. That is not including the company performing their standard business transactions.

Imagine the amount of data Netflix and Hulu sent out in 2016? How many 16GB USB sticks worth?
Here is the thing with video streaming packets: they are large, they require very low chances of being dropped, very high requirement of perfectly being timed to delivery, also very low chance of causing poor quality. It takes some very high end equipment that eats up a lot of power to do this consistently. These .com companies don’t want to pay for it.

That is like me having a shipping and freight company, but me not paying my fair share of taxes in order to maintain and improve the roads. In scenarios like that, you get one of the three outcomes:
• in order to maintain the roads and improve the roads to handle the huge trucks, everyone will pay an increase on a tax (sales, property, gasoline)
• nothing will happen and a war of attrition will happen and the roads will fall apart. The goal is for the government to get my company to pay for road maintenance cause by me
• force my company to pay via lawsuit, which my company will probably pick up and leave if that happens since I am not getting any special treatment anymore.

That scenario is exactly the same thing with Net Neutrality.
• If the .com sites won’t pay for their fair share, then the ISPs will charge consumers more money since they are the end users
• If a law prevents ISPs from charging consumers too much, then a war of attrition will happen. The ISPs’ goal is to get the .coms to pay for their increased traffic. Though the .com people will never pay, instead the consumer will be dealing with degrading technology and lines. ISPs will just keep doing bare minimum
• A lawsuit goes against the .coms and the just get up and leave. They don’t even have to physically leave, they can change their headquarters to another country just by moving a few pieces of paper. Of course, they won’t need to leave, they have “friends” in all levels of government ready to protect them if that comes about. Of course, NN Title 2 was their baby.

This is what NN is actually about: corporations not paying their fair share. We all want corporations to pay their fair share, correct?

InB4: “Look how much money the ISPs made X year, <insert something about greed here>.” I will point to how much these .com companies have made. Most of that money comes from selling your personal information to other companies and the government.

*Yes, I do actually work for an ISP.

[Freyt]

Hi, Xtrasweettea who is an ISP shill* here to respond!

This is incredibly enlightening. I look forward to anything else about this you wish to share.