nanog mailing list archives

Re: Online games stealing your bandwidth


From: Jon Lewis <jlewis () lewis org>
Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2010 16:56:21 -0400 (EDT)

On Sat, 25 Sep 2010, Rodrick Brown wrote:

If you follow the links in the article people are complaining that the LotR
process has served 70gb in a week, others are complaining that the service
is resulting in 300ms pings, and unusable connections.
This is a very grey area it will be interesting how this issue unfolds in
the long run.

I haven't played any of these things, so I don't know what they put in the fine print, but unless LotR makes it clear that they're going to utilize your (i.e. players of the game) bandwidth to PTP distribute their software, I'd call that theft and unauthorized use of a computer network. Are these companies not making enough in monthly subscriptions to afford Akamai or similar CDN services to distribute their software updates?

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