Taken from the League of Legends forum on their main website:

"These opinions are mine and do not reflect Riot's opinion in any way shape or form. These opinions have been formed from my own experience, again these are mine and mine alone.*

www.nytimes.com/2014/04/24/technology/fc...eutrality-rules.html

As a Wrench I volunteer my time to Riot to support their players. In my "real life" job I, along with family, operate an Internet Service Provider (ISP). Net Neutrality is something that has been important to those of us in the industry for a very long time. In the simplest terms it represents the idea that data is data, traffic is traffic, and that it doesn't matter who it goes to or where it comes from (so long as it is legal). What this means to the end user and customer (you) is that we don't care where you get your data. We do not decide that it is OK for you to get traffic from Google, but not from Yahoo; or try and charge you more for one over the other.*

This very basic belief and principle has been under attack for awhile now. A small number of exceptionally large ISPs have been pushing for the "right" to charge content providers, like Netflix, Amazon, anyone really, more money based off the volume the ISPs customers use of the provider. An example would be Comcast wanting to charge Netflix money, because a lot of Comcast customers use Netflix's service. Should Netflix not pay those fees, then their traffic is handled differently - in the past this practice has caused near complete outages of some services on some networks.*

In other words; large providers are wanting to put toll booths on the internet and charge providers a fee related to how that traffic is handled. The issue with this is that you as the customer are already paying that ISP for that traffic, and the content provider is even paying their ISP for that traffic as well. In a sense these big ISPs are trying to triple dip into the pockets of anyone they can!*

So what could this potentially mean to you as a League of Legends player? It means that an ISP can decide to try and charge Riot Games money for that traffic to come across their network with any level of priority. Should Riot Games not pay that fee then you as a gamer have a very negative experience with League of Legends. That ISP is essentially going to throttle, filter, or handle the traffic differently that is coming and going to Riot servers. The same thing can be said with any content or popular product, video games are not immune to this!*

This past February an Appeals Court ruled the above behavior OK, and the FCC objected to that ruling, intending on fighting it. In the past the FCC itself struck down these proposals to protect Net Neutrality, and the end user. For reasons not yet understood they have decided to make a complete 180 on these decisions and are planning on moving ahead with allowing "Fast Lanes" to be established. Do not let that name fool you!*

As someone in the industry I have seen several instances of large providers having disputes over traffic, completely shutting down certain flows of traffic for entire regions!*

This goes beyond League of Legends, it goes much deeper than that. This will give major providers the ability to control access to any service they deem worthy of their attention. Facebook, World of Warcraft, Wikipedia, League of Legends, Google, Yahoo, Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, they would all become open game to large providers.*

Pay the fee, or get choked.....

I know this might be a little long winded, but this is important. Anyone reading this needs to contact their Representatives and voice your concerns over this. Urge those Representatives to voice their concerns on your behalf! We can not allow the Internet to be turned into a series of "Pay to Win" toll booths that are dominated by the big providers.*

The Internet needs to remain Neutral! Data is data, networks do not care who or what it comes from so long as it is legitimate. The traffic you send to Netflix or Riot is no different in structure than the traffic you send to Google or Youtube!"

Thoughts? Opinions?

Tl:dr?

Dough-Money-Moola-Bank-Benjamins-StacksOnStacks

Tl;dr: Big ISPs now have permission to charge internet based services for "fast lane" data routing. As in "pay us more money or we'll throttle you into oblivion."

I know if the states do it Canada will at least try and follow. We're fairly relax about internet here, like I here in the states most ISPs have crappy internet caps unless you want to pay out the butt. Here and Canada, you can get unlimited for between 30-50 dollars ish. But Canadian ISPs are all kind of in bed together, all prices for packages are exactly the same, so the 3 of them, could possibly push for charging for stuff. I just hope it doesn't happen here. We can take in all the American nerds who have been forced out of house and home because Netflix is like 20 dollars a month, and half goes to Netflix and half goes to the ISP

The issue with peering arrangements goes far deeper then this article points out, these types of actions by large ISP's have the potential to destroy a business that the ISP does not like. An example of this is Hulu, Comcast (who owns much of the content provided on Hulu) has constantly increased the cost of content that Hulu streams, now with this new proposal that the FCC has come up with the will also attempt to force higher fees for traffic. Hulu cannot afford these fees unless they charge customers more money and/or run more ads per stream.

This brings up another point that's even more upsetting, in the article the author said that the ISP's were basically trying to "triple dip", this will be true in most cases. However, in the case of site like Netflix and Hulu, some ISP's such as Comcast are dipping into them four times, once for the content they lease to these sites and three times for traffic. All of this cost will be translated to the consumer because in order to pay for these fees these sites will have to charge each customer more.

This is a real issue that we, as the people who elect the people that employ the FCC, must take action and let our representatives know we don't want this. For those of you who think that your voice doesn't matter you are wrong, the SOPA issue is proof of that!

Off to Canada I go lol

See, thats the thing. The internet has become nearly vital these days. Whether it be for school, work, gaming, etc...you gotta have that connectivity to keep up. Currently, I pay 42 USD a month for 8Mb/s internet and an extremely basic cable package. Add in $8 netflix, $15 for XBL, and my internet costs are sitting at about $65 a month. I probably pay about $1000 a month for rent, electricity, gas, and water. Add on another $400 minimum for food, house supplies, and baby stuff (diapers, etc). Me and the girly combined bring in just under $1600 a month combined. So..if the prices go up for internet services, even by % 25, we'd have to drop it. Hashtag poverty lol

EDIT: Didnt factor in gas costs for the car lol jeeez it sucks to see how broke you are on paper xD


Oh lord, wont ya buy me, a Mercedes Benz...

^ pretty much in the same situation + I'm working extra shift to try and buy a new car >.<

Anyways on the subject:

I live in Quebec and my isp will charge some extra if you download more than 50g a month or depending on the plan up to 250g download/upload combined a month. Then they will charge 10$ for each extra gig dl/up(combined) to a maximum of 50$. Well anyways most of our isp in the area will charge like 50$~60$/month for a basic high-speed connection(i.e. 10mbs/s download and 1.5mbs/s upload cap) however you can choose to add 10$/month for an unlimited access. In all and all it sounds all good huh?

The catch is, for the very same 60$/month you can get a 60mbs/sec connection so... yeah lol. Sadly the unlimited plan can only be added to the basic high-speed internet. Also if you got a 190$ to waste a month you could get the 200mbs/sec connection...

Just pointing out that big isp companies are already on the "fast lane" factor so moving to Canada wouldn't really solve the issue.