One of the reasons people get so angry about bandwidth caps and ISPs trying to control what you do on the Internet (which they hide behind marketing non-speak like “shaping” because “throttling” and “choking off” don’t test well) is that you’re not getting what you pay for, and in some cases, you’re also not getting what you pay someone else for.
This is the situation Canadian WoW players find themselves in with the company Rogers, one of the biggest providers of Internet to Canada. Rogers has admitted not just that they’re giving WoW players a slower connection, but in some cases interfering with the connection.
What’s the problem? Torrenting. WoW updates using torrents, and Rogers is pretending this causes problems on their network instead of just admitting what’s obvious to everybody: they mess with any torrenting software being used, and WoW happens to be in the crossfire. Rogers admits as much when they say WoW players should turn off “internal peer-to-peer” settings. Oh, and it’s also Blizzard’s fault.
Are we sure Rogers isn’t secretly owned by Comcast?
[ via the night elves from The Next Web ]