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Why Gamers Need Net Neutrality

Why Gamers Need Net Neutrality

The current push for real net neutrality has been making news for the past few days. What a few years ago seemed like a losing battle for rights that would eventually lose out to the interests of businesses now looks like a battle that can and will be won. The newest FCC proposal will prevent blocking, throttling, paid prioritization, and other dubious acts of internet censorship or restriction.

But why do we, as video gamers, actually care about net neutrality? Why is this political issue so important to us? The deeper ramifications of net neutrality can be debated for hours, but here is a quick overview.

The concept of net neutrality is basically what it says on the tin. The net is, and should be, essentially neutral. No matter what you’re connecting to, whether it’s Facebook, the PSN, your own personal website, 4Chan, or the mysterious deep web, the content gets delivered to you all the same.

Without net neutrality, internet service providers could essentially levy higher fees for parts of their network that take up more bandwith. For example, they could charge you a basic 30 dollar fee for internet service. However, if you want access to social media sites, like facebook and twitter, you’d have to pay 10 dollars extra. Then if you want to be able to stream media over Youtube or Hulu, you’d have to pay yet ANOTHER 10 dollars, and so on and so forth. Or, perhaps, they could do something like let you watch Youtube until you have seen a gigabyte of video, and then charge you extra for every other gigabyte you view from that site.

Of course, all online gaming is just another form of connecting to servers and transmitting and receiving data. So without net neutrality, a bunch of extra costs could be put on gaming. Imagine if you’d have to pay for your internet, the PlayStation Network, and then pay an ADDITIONAL fee for connecting to gaming sites. Heck, if they charge you for the gigabyte, then you’d rack up huge fees downloading games on digital distribution platforms.

Why Gamers Need Net Neutrality

But crappy added expenses are only part of the problem. Gaming is evolving because it can make liberal use of the internet. DLC, for better or worse, has evolved as a result of the internet. Digital distribution has evolved as a result of inexpensive access to the internet. Heck, patching, something that has been going on since the days of Baldur’s Gate , has evolved as a result of the internet. If all of these actions end up coming with extra fees, developers may end up utilizing them less. As a result, we would be stuck with hard copy games and only hard copy games. No friends lists. No online play. Nothing that takes advantage of the internet. In effect, it could blast gaming back to the Stone Age.

Gaming, essentially, relies on a free internet, but the only way we will get that free internet is through net neutrality. Otherwise, there is basically nothing stopping internet service providers from charging us extra money, which then makes both developers and customers use the internet for gaming less.

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