With the protest group close to 120,000 members, Infinity Ward's Robert Bowling has offered further details about Modern Warfare 2's dedicated server replacement, IWNET:

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is actually the biggest investment Infinity Ward has ever made into the PC version of our games. It’s also the most feature-rich PC version we’ve ever made. IWNET takes the benefits of dedicated servers and allows them to be utilized and accessed by every player, out of the box, while removing the barrier to entry for players unaware of how to maintain a server on their own.

How does it do this?

Matchmaking & Smoother Gameplay: When you want to player a multiplayer game on PC, in the past. You’d have to scroll through a Server Browser which listed every available server which was hosted by individual server admins. Each had their own private rules, mods, or ways of playing the game. Most players would also use the server browser to find just the best quality game (based on PING). With IWNET matchmaking, it takes all that into account for you. All you have to do is select the playlist (pre-set gametypes with custom rules) that fits the style of play you are in the mood for. When you do, it will automatically find you a game with the best performance, ping, and preferences based on your location and individual connection as well as matching you with players of your same SKILL. So you’re always guaranteed the best game performance for where you are and what connection you’re playing on as well as an equal game with other players of your same skill level, not rank, but skill level. It doesn’t mean you’ll just be thrown into a random game! It will put you in the game that will give you the smoothest gameplay possible without you having to manually find a server with the best ping.

Cheat / Hack Free Games: The biggest benefit of using IWnet by far is the fact that you don’t have to worry about joining a server full of aim-bots, wallhacks, or cheaters. Or relying on the server admin of the server to constantly be monitoring, banning, and policing it. Modern Warfare 2 on PC allows us to control the quality of the game much more than ever before as well as utilizing the VAC (Valve-Anti-Cheat) system to keep games clean of hackers and cheaters.

All in all, IWNET adds a load of new features that the PC version of our games have never had before and allows us an infrastructure to continue to update and improve on the game post-launch.

All in all, a step back for PC gaming. Matchmaking is fine in addition to a server browser, but removing an option ingrained into our platform's past is a major snafu.