“Are You Affected?” Gamers, Publics, and Network Neutrality Enforcement

• In Event: Paradoxes of Participation: Open Platforms, Closed Knowledge?

Abstract

In 2010, Canadians had a hard time playing World of Warcraft (WoW). The massive multi-player game was at its height of popularity, but Canadians, particularly customers of Rogers Internet, suffered from lag and disconnections. Explanations were scattered across niche news sites, blogs as well as the support forums for the game and local Internet Service Providers. Post by post, WoW gamers came to understand they had a common affliction. Rogers Internet was throttling the game’s traffic. That would be a violation of the Canadian regulator’s new so-called Network Neutrality framework that banned undisclosed throttling, if the gamers could prove it. Onus rested on the customers to prove the violation. Over the next two years, gamers did prove the problem to the regulator through a series of complaints and submissions of evidence, It led to the eventual decision by Rogers Internet to stop Internet throttling.


This presentation reviews the policy intervention by WoW gamers as a critical case both to understand post-Network Neutrality enforcement and public accountability of infrastructures. Network Neutrality continues to be a leading media policy issue and it exemplifies widening concerns about the accountability of search engines, platforms and other digital infrastructures. Publics have an important role in resolve accountability issues. WoW gamers together formed a public, in the tradition of John Dewey, as strangers that collectively solved their shared afflictions.


Infrastructures like the Internet, however, thwart the formation of publics. Gamers only had a sense of something weird, but lacked points of reflection associated with the formation of publics. My paper uses the case of WoW gamers to discuss how publics form around the indirect consequences of infrastructure. Publics comes to know themselves and their issue through cycles of positive feedback where research leads to a better, wider definition of their problems. Specifically, the presentation examined at how Internet measurements function as mediators to aid both the convention of publics and their shared inquiry. The presentation concludes by discussing other infrastructural publics and reflecting on the challenges of reactive publics to effective regulation.

Author

• Fenwick McKelvey, Concordia U