***I copied and pasted this all from a topic on Scorehero, and this came from the MLG forums***
*****Also, any famous youtubers or bloggers or anything, please spread this if you care. Maybe just post a one minute video telling people about it and put a link to sign the petition in the "More Info" section.*****
For those who don't feel like reading everything related to net neutrality, here's some information regarding an aspect of it you may be interested in: online gaming.
Per the ECA
"Without Net Neutrality, your Internet Service Provider is free to charge you extra for playing World of Warcraft, to interfere with Xbox Live, or to completely shut off your ability to access your favorite Web sites. Net Neutrality affects your entire online experience!"
Per Ramp Rate
"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 oblivion;
* 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 packages). Their Usenet services were then unceremoniously dumped by their providers (AOL and Comcast being two of the more notorious)."
"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 cash, would result in drastic, irreparable harm to consumers, technology developers, the economy and tax revenue - and even the ISPs themselves."