Is internet addiction a real thing or is it a hoax to scare teens

After reading Leah Nash's Room For Debate article entitled "Is Internet Addiction a Health Threat for Teens?" it made me really question what we call an addiction. The American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM) classifies an addiction as an "inability to consistently abstain, impairment in behavioral control, craving, diminished recognition of significant problems with one's behavior  and interpersonal relationships, and a dysfunctional emotional response." The only people I have seen being this bad with video games and the internet in general are twelve year olds, and sometimes younger. Even in these cases it is not to the extreme described above because often times parents begin to step in and restrict that child's access to these things.

Furthermore the sentence "[an] in ability to consistently abstain" confuses me because if that were the case, technically people who do YouTube for a living, and those who are video game testers/ designers would fall into this category because they are unable to 'consistently abstain' and would probably exhibit an 'impairment in behavioral control' if they were unable figure something out.

Ending off with teens however, in my experience I have not had to deal with nor have I met people who exhibited this sort of extreme need for the internet. While there may be cases nationwide, and even worldwide, I do not think it is as big of a problem in the US as parents and adults make it out to be.