How will net-neutrality affect WoW and subscription fees?

[Deleted]

However the architecture is laid out it doesn't change the fact that in order for any information to come into or out of the USA you gotta go through this.

But when the architecture is laid out the way where the information doesn't hit USA at all, it's not a problem for rest of the world (or at least very limited problem). For example Netflix - my ISP just peers with their open connect https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/peering-locations/ - it's very hard for Comcast to complain (or raise the price of the transit). Same with Google services. My traffic doesn't hit US when I watch Youtube. And same with WoW - my traffic never hits US. It hits a datacenter i Paris. And it's carried by TELIANET (their backbone map here: https://www.teliacarrier.com/dms/tel...e_Oct_2017.pdf)

Yes, some traffic is of course still going to route through domestic US carriers and then travel through normal transit carriers - but settlement fees in the backbone transit net are nothing new, they've always existed - even during NN era so I don't think this actually really changes the landscape drastically in that regard.

I think the biggest change will be the last-mile cable "paywalls" or more likely packing up services in smaller portions based on "content" (or some other silly arbitrary reason they'll make up)

[Twdft]

WoW traffic has been hit before after being "mistakenly" identified as torrenting.

Patches are distributed via torrenting, so the identification was correct.

[Kiri]

You do realise that WoW was there long before the so called net-neutrality? One could even make a case that during the absence of Obama's net-neutrality WoW was at its peak. :P

Why can't net-neutrality opponents - i.e. monopoly fans - never do their homework? WoW was not there long before any so called net-neutrality. The principles had been there much longer; what you call net-neutrality is the title II classification that engraved the principles stronger than ever before. But that was only necessary because the courts told the FCC that they would have to do it in order to stop ISPs from their anti-consumer practices. The FCC has been in nigh-constant struggles with ISPs for over a decade, they just did not need to do the title II thing before, but instead used other means to stop bad actors. They protected consumers during the Bush era. They protected consumers during the Obama years. And now they are protecting monopolies.

[glowpipe]

No. Your "Internet package" price will go up considerably. The connection you buy from one of the big 3-4 ISP's you have in US will most likely be split into segments much like cable TV has been.

You want to play games? Buy our "Unlimited Gaming Internet"-package. You want to read news? Buy our "Daily News Internet"-package - and so on..
It won't really affect WoW sub price - because it's mostly about your big ISPs being jealous of having to be "just a common carrier" and not being able to charge for specific services. Putting the fees on your last mile cable is the perfect way to do this, since they completely control that market.

Mobile networks were designed for this from the start - that's why we had "Free 50 text messages a month" type of packages.

This is first and foremost anti-consumer move.
And they do this because you can't actually switch ISP if you're unhappy. There is no one that offers you alternatives.
The majority of US broadband market is in the iron grip of very few megacorps.

They can't milk the money from Blizzard, Facebook or Netflix - because of peering agreements. It's very hard to do. They will milk it from the consumers because now they can.

They will do it from both. Money is the root to all evil. If they want to reduce the speed to blizzards servers, they can until they pay.

[Deleted]

They will do it from both. Money is the root to all evil. If they want to reduce the speed to blizzards servers, they can until they pay.

Probably. But again - fairly US-centric problem. Not a global panic as some here seem to think.
For clarity - several EU countries have also had their own local "NN-equivalent" fights. Some have succeeded repelling anti-consumerism, some have failed.

[Boogieknight]

You do realise that WoW was there long before the so called net-neutrality? One could even make a case that during the absence of Obama's net-neutrality WoW was at its peak. :P

Net neutrality has been a long-term battle since the early 2000s. As the internet expanded with additonal things that weren't as common or didn't exist then such as social media, video streaming, online gaming, digital game downloads, online businesses, and technological miracles like smart phones, tablets, and a litany of connected devices such as fitbits and iPods the opportunity to make money increased and the FCC fought a LONG time to keep providers in line. That ended in 2014 when Verizon won a court case that the FCC couldn't regulate them at all unless they were listed as common carrier under Title II restrictions. This finally occurred in 2015, and I'll give you 2 guesses who isn't ^@$ing happy about that and wants it gone.

[Deleted]

I´m with the opinion that it wont affect that much to the users. I mean, if internet providers give so many "internet packages" that make the user pay for the double they are paying now they are just creating a way so other companies can be introduced in the market and start to provide internet for a cheaper price. There are iniciatives to make internet a free thing around the world so I don´t really know how the bussiness is going to run if for a similar product you might end up paying 60 bucks more.

Charging more to companies like Blizzard makes more sense in they way that they would not make them pay for a internet speed better than it is but for an even faster than we alrdeady have. That way it can improve the infrastucture, you get to provide a better service towards your users and you don´t charge them anything so you can be competetive against other companies that provide internet.

[rda]

The portrayal of NN by the media has been abysmal, they ended up basically misrepresenting the story.

Here is a post that does a much better job:

The government isn't needed to solve this, which is why NN is bad. ( There is a reason why a big government, globalist shill, aka BHO and Google/Facebook wanted this sooo badly in the first place.)

First you need to understand how this is all connected. In general, there are 2 types of ISPs. "Last mile carriers" and "Backhaul carriers" This gets a bit muddy because some last mile carriers have backhaul networks, and some backhaul carriers have last mile networks, but for the sake of this discussion we'll keep them in two separate groups.

Last mile carriers are the ISPs that bring the cables (phone line, coax, fiber, wireless, whatever) from their core network to your house. This is the ISP that invoices you and you pay every month for your internet service. This Last mile carrier has something that's referred to as a "border" where they connect their core network with a backhaul carrier.

The backhaul carriers are the BIG companies that built this whole "Internet" thing. They did that by investing trillions of dollars running and continuing to run fiber optic cables EVERYWHERE. These backhaul carriers all got together and realized that they needed to come up with a fair and equitable method and price structure for freely and openly exchanging the information on their networks. Thus the Symmetric Peering Arrangement was born.

The Symmetric Peering Arrangement was basically this. "You have lots of data, and I have lots of data. Let us exchange this data equally, however much data you send me I will send you an equal amount of data and we'll all just agree to not charge each other any money for that exchange." But wait? What if they exchange an unequal amount of data? This is the Asymmetric Peering Arrangement, typically it's the same thing as the Symmetric Peering Arrangement except that the both parties agree to pay for the non-symmetric amounts of data. This is what lead to the internet. Basically all these carriers put all their interconnecting and cross connecting points in free and open spaces, called Internet Exchanges. Anyone who showed up and put a "point of presence" in the Exchange had the ability to talk to anyone else in the Exchange and negotiate peering arrangements or even just ask nicely to exchange traffic or whatever. Here's a guy who setup a peering point in an Internet Exchange and essentially became is own ISP for no other reason that he thought it would be fun.

Now comes Netflix. Remember ANYONE can have a presence at an Internet Exchange including hosting companies, data center providers, whoever the fuck wants to. So that's exactly what Netflix did, they set up POPs at various Internet Exchanges over dark fiber from their data centers (dark fiber is a service where you buy a fiber strand from point A to point B with no actual "service" on it, it's just the fiber and you put your own optical gear on either end.)

Basically when they did this, they talked to everyone there and explained what they were about, that they provide a streaming movie service that's legit and legal and made the case that the carriers downstream last mile ISPs and assorted home subscribers would probably love to have access to their content. They made a good case, and the carriers agreed that peering that content to their downstream customers was probably a good move. So they gave Netflix some 10Gbps and 40Gbps cross connects told them "hey this is on us, no charge" and called it a day. (This is extremely common, so common that there's an entire automated system in place run by the volunteers that operate the Exchanges to facilitate it)

Well, you can probably guess what happened, Netflix grew and became crazy popular and their traffic eventually started beating those cross connects like red headed stepchildren. We're talking 100% full ALL the time. As others have touched on, when a link is 100% full, bad shit happens as one poster described as "a bunch of drunk guys screaming at each other in a bar." The end result of this would be the rest of the Internet works just fine, but Netflix runs like TOTAL SHIT. Stuttering, jitter, buffering, garbled frames, all that stuff. When this happened, Netflix was like "OMG can we please get some additional cross connects?" The carriers (or in the first case of it happening, Verizon) responded with statements to the affect of "Wow, yeah you need some more cross connects, but that's a lot of asymmetric traffic, we're going to have to work out an asymmetric peering arrangement where you pay for the difference in traffic, just like we've done for decades with everyone else we do this with."

Now, you see what happened next was...Netflix didn't respond by saying "Oh ok, sure we'll sit down and work out the details" they responded by being pissed off and demanding that peering for FREE because having to pay for it like EVERYONE else had to do so up to that point was tantamount to an unfair business practice. Now the stories I've heard talking to people over at Verizon was that the business managers were kinda shocked and confused at the response, while the engineering teams nearly herniated themselves from laughing.

Now, looking at the situation, Verizon didn't "throttle" Netflix, they didn't demand payment for a "fast lane", they didn't stroke their bad guy mustache and say "Muhahahaha, we're going to use this situation give our own content delivery platform a market advantage!" It was literally just a standard negotiation for an asymmetric peering agreement with some minor middle manager's assistant in the sub-division handling administrative and sales tasks for that region that the Internet Exchange was in. All it was, was a pretty basic business arrangement between two companies, as Netflix' traffic utilization scaled up, so would the amount they paid to deliver it and the necessary upgrades needed would be funded.

Netflix wasn't having it. Not long after that, the CEO of Netflix did an interview with some trendy tech publication in Silicon Valley (I think it was Gizmodo, but I can't remember for sure) talking about how the big evil Verizon was "throttling" them and how we needed "Net Neutrality" to stop this.

Yes, that was their argument, that them saturating their free interconnects and being required to pay for more capacity was "throttling" and it needed to be "stopped" by the FCC (that's code for using the federal government to force Verizon to give them that capacity for free).

So the conclusion is that the carriers HAVE FIGURED IT OUT. They charged Netflix, and Netflix eventually paid. The Last mile carriers wound doing something similar by instituting data caps and charging extra to those who had high utilization. Then everyone started implementing traffic shaping and management methods and technology to get the Netflix utilization under control at the last mile.

Problem is now solved.

Here's where Net Neutrality comes back in. Netflix and Google and Facebook and whoever all still want it because they want to force peering arrangements beneficial to them. But the end result of Net Neutrality would be to remove the carriers solution of dealing with this problem, namely charging Netflix and Google for their upstream consumption at the peering level, and using traffic shaping and management technologies at the last mile level.

Let me state that again, NET NEUTRALITY WOULD REMOVE THE ALREADY EXITING SOLUTION. It would cut the revenue stream at the peering level, and it would remove the traffic shaping and management at the last mile level. This would INCREASE the strain on the carrier networks, AND reduce the spending on upgrading the carrier networks. It will LITERALLY make EVERYTHING worse.

---

It is just completely stunning how much the media has been degrading over the years. Partisan, sensationalist, incompetent, stupid. Trying to have their own say at times.

The world needs some evolution of the media. Maybe it will come in the next ten-twenty years (it better did).

[Eucep]

For time being, nothing. It needs to pass congress first. Past that if it does really pass. Then likely for the time being still nothing. Unless Activision-Blizzard has pissed off providers in the USA it likely will not see an increase in costs. It's largely safe due to size of company. If this was just Blizzard it would be in more likely trouble of having to play more. In the long run however it depends on if the providers end up buying out each other, eliminating competition. If it does end up with just one or two mega providers with everything else being taken out, including state run ones that are being set up now, then you will see that plan of forcing you to pay more being set in motion.

[micwini]

We all will likely be given the "option" of a gamer package/bundle from our ISP which can be any ungodly cost that they wish, either that or Blizzard will pay that price for us, but it will result in there being more micro-transactions, possibly more store items instead of in-game items, or the basic subscription module may go up... or any given combination of those.

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It will effect the EU, though. Blizzard could accept the ransom from US ISPs and decide to raise prices of subscriptions, add more micro-transactions, or whatever else, across all of their playerbase to soften the resentment on the home-front.

EU is already paying more for a sub than NA. Also no reason why they should raise subs in the first place. ISP's charges NA people more, not Blizzard.

[Lahis]

EU is already paying more for a sub than NA. Also no reason why they should raise subs in the first place. ISP's charges NA people more, not Blizzard.

ISPs can throttle the connection to big businesses and services for their clients, like Comcast did with Netflix and it's customers. Only after Netflix paid the ransom was Netflix properly viewable by Comcast clients.

[Torrasque]

EU is already paying more for a sub than NA. Also no reason why they should raise subs in the first place. ISP's charges NA people more, not Blizzard.

They can, though, also charge Blizzard. Blizzard has the option to accept that ransom so that they NA clients do not then increase costs or add ad-fare or more micro-transactions across a much broader international audience, which is what happened to Netflix. This way, the NA consumers don't notice such a devastating hit to their annual costs to play Blizzard games as what they would have had to pay in ransom to the ISP instead being picked up by Blizzard and administered indirectly to everyone internationally is a significantly softer blow, therefore keeping more people subscribed and playing their games and buying their in-game items / micro-transactions to upkeep costs.

[Deleted]

ISPs can throttle the connection to big businesses and services for their clients, like Comcast did with Netflix and it's customers. Only after Netflix paid the ransom was Netflix properly viewable by Comcast clients.

Each European country has their own legislation though, so this recent vote in US has fuck all to do with Blizzard Entertainment SAS in Versailles, the European datacenters or the EU clients that generate traffic towards those datacenters.

ISP in US can't throttle that. They're not magical.

[Lahis]

Not in Europe though.

Yeah, but if Blizzard faces similar ransoms in America, they will offset those costs to their customers. And that will affect EU players too.

[Deleted]

Yeah, but if Blizzard faces similar ransoms in America, they will offset those costs to their customers. And that will affect EU players too.

I very much doubt it. Let's not get carried away in wild speculation.
If anything it will hit the US subs (but it won't). Blizzard EU is completely different legal unit from Blizzard mothership in US, I doubt Blizzard US even sets the sub pricing in EU - I bet that's done by local sales in the European business unit.

Where it will hurt is in US home broadband pricing. You probably need to purchase a "gaming" package from your ISP, to get the "best ever Intenet gaming experience"

[Gadzooks]

Yeah, but if Blizzard faces similar ransoms in America, they will offset those costs to their customers. And that will affect EU players too.

It doesn't work that way. At all.

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History has shown that this was not the case. Specific example was Comcast and Netflix in 2014 where Comcast was metering and restricting data from Netflix onto its networks causing Netflix to try to find ways around it, but in the end the only way to do it was to pay a direct access fee to Comcast or risk losing customers on their network. This went away after the Net Neutrality ruling in 2015 because under Title II Comcast is required to transmit A-N-Y-T-H-I-N-G that accesses its network to anyone who requests it because as a common carrier that is their purpose: to allow unrestricted access to anything on the internet at any time, no questions asked. Going back on that decision you'll see a lot of what Comcast did happening because the demand for a service like Netflix hasn't really decreased, so the chance to make more money from consumers, providers, or both.

No. Netflix solved the problem by installing databases of all their movies in ISP's datacenters, so viewers aren't pulling streams from one centralized source, and cut down their traffic significantly.

https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/

There's a lot of disinformation and just plain old made up data in this thread, typical of any thread on this subject on any platform.

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You'll likely have to pay Cuntcast, Verishit, or ATeat&Tit (or whatever garbage ISP you're forced to go with) just to access WoW, on top of your subscription to Blizzard. Similarly with Netflix, Hulu, etc, you'll have to pay to ACCESS the website, then also pay the site a subscription fee.

Alternatively, you can use any of the garbage from your ISP for free (and by free, I mean included in your $500/month for 5Mbps bandwidth), which is significantly worse because they put as little effort into their own software as they do into the infrastructure, competition, and actually being decent fucking human beings.

There is is literally no way for Comcast to specifically charge you to access a specific website. All they can do is slow down access to that specific site, or block it. And, you can get around that by using open source DNS servers, like you can right now. I've never used Comcast's DNS servers, as a Comcast customer, because Google's free DNS servers are better.

Your post is 100% FUD and completely made up fairy tales.

TL;DR: Expect to pay more for everything else, access to WoW included, but this is only if Congress is corrupt and fucked enough to actually let this pass.

PS: Congress doesn't pass policy changes at the FCC. They can overturn it in a 60 day window, after the policy is changed, but they have no direct oversight, and this was a policy change, not a law. Learn how the government works before making comments like this.

[Lahis]

It doesn't work that way. At all.

Why? If Blizzard faces increased costs due to ISP fuckery, they will compensate those losses elsewhere.

[Deleted]

Why? If Blizzard faces increased costs due to ISP fuckery, they will compensate those losses elsewhere.

Why would they compensate them elsewhere? Wouldn't they do it in the market where the losses occur instead? I'm not sure if the Blizzard EU VP would be very happy if the US branch messed up his numbers like that.

There's really no need to go for the kneejerk hyperbole quite yet.

[Lahis]

Why would they compensate them elsewhere? Wouldn't they do it in the market where the losses occur instead? I'm not sure if the Blizzard EU VP would be very happy if the US branch messed up his numbers like that.

There's really no need to go for the kneejerk hyperbole quite yet.

Blizzard operates globally, they take their income from everywhere. The new income doesn't need to be increased sub fee, it can be loot boxes or some other shit.

[Deleted]

Blizzard operates globally, they take their income from everywhere. The new income doesn't need to be increased sub fee, it can be loot boxes or some other shit.

Interesting. I wasn't aware of that. What sort of KPIs does their EU Vice President have to deliver then, if it's not financially connected at all?
It's quite unusual to run a 5000 employee strong company in completely flat organizational and financial structure. Especially since they're not even same legal entities. I've actually never heard of that before - could you give me a link where I can read more about these insights?