SEPT. 16, 2011 • The Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Com. gave Rogers Communications 10 days to resolve consumer complaints that the broadband provider had incorrectly classified online games as peer-to-peer traffic, after which connection speeds were throttled down to a crawl.

Impact: It is too much to hope that the U.S. Federal Communications Com. would ever take such a consumer-friendly stance given the political lobbies now lined up against net neutrality, yet the Canadian example provides a clear example on how regulatory agencies should react to technical impediments to online gaming. This same misclassification by broadband providers of online games as peer-to-peer clients has also been a problem in the U.S., and never got much notice in Washington. To somewhat anxious gamers, its all a show of pipeline thuggery by powerful Internet providers ­– a supposed test run in their goal to shift bandwidth to where more money can be charged. If the major broadband carriers are successful in changing regulations so that they are able to charge additional fees for high-speed access to specific content, angry gamers will not have been so paranoid after all.