‘Call of Duty’ chief smacks down ISPs says they are moving society backwards
When you hear cries and rants against bandwidth caps, which are becoming more popular in the US but standard in Canada, it is usually from people like myself and others that depend on web access; and lots of it, on a daily basis. The argument used by the ISPs to back up this ridiculous state of affairs is that they are just trying to protect their networks from undue congestion caused by the bandwidth hogs.
As cute as that argument might be it is also a fallacious argument that unfortunately is swallowed by the majority of people, so it was really nice to read this smack down of ISPs by Mark Rubin, executive producer at Infinity Ward; one of the video game companies responsible for the Call of Duty video game franchise.
In the post at Huffington Post Rubin says that ISPs are holding back innovations with their predatory practices.
Mark Rubin, executive producer at Infinity Ward, the studio behind the ‘Call of Duty’ series, says Internet service providers are holding back innovation with restrictive practices. Both usage-based billing, where customers receive monthly download limits, and throttling, where certain applications are slowed down, are proving to be obstacles to the games industry’s advancement.
“We’re trying to progress and move into those new areas of downloading content and full games and streaming live. We’re pushing forward and it seems like they’re going backwards,” Rubin said in an interview at this past weekend’s inaugural Call of Duty XP fan convention in Los Angeles.
“I don’t know what they’re afraid of that they have to do all this capping. If they have serious problems with bandwidth, they need to solve that because society is moving forward.”
It is one thing for people like myself and other tech writers to decry things like caps but it is another thing altogether when the man responsible for one of the most successful game franchises, and part of a company that makes billions of dollars due to people being able to access the web, says it.
