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Wikipedia's "Complicated" Relationship With Net Neutrality
HughPickens.com writes Brian Fung writes in the Washington Post that Wikipedia has been a little hesitant to weigh in on net neutrality, the idea that all Web traffic should be treated equally by Internet service providers such as Comcast or Time Warner Cable. That's because the folks behind Wikipedia actually see a non-neutral Internet as one way to spread information cheaply to users in developing countries. With Wikipedia Zero, users in places like Pakistan and Malaysia can browse the site without it counting against the data caps on their cellphones or tablets. This preferential treatment for Wikipedia's site helps those who can't afford to pay for pricey data — but it sets the precedent for deals that cut against the net neutrality principle. "We believe in net neutrality in America," says Gayle Karen Young, adding that Wikipedia Zero requires a different perspective elsewhere. "Partnering with telecom companies in the near term, it blurs the net neutrality line in those areas. It fulfills our overall mission, though, which is providing free knowledge."
Facebook and Google also operate programs internationally that are exempted from users' data caps — a tactic known somewhat cryptically as "zero rating". Facebook in particular has made "Facebook Zero" not just a sales pitch in developing markets but also part of an Internet.org initiative to expand access "to the two thirds of the world's population that doesn't have it." But a surprising decision in Chile shows what happens when policies of neutrality are applied without nuance. Chile recently put an end to the practice, widespread in developing countries, of big companies "zero-rating" access to their services. "That might seem perverse," says Glyn Moody, "since it means that Chilean mobile users must now pay to access those services, but it is nonetheless exactly what governments that have mandated net neutrality need to do."
Facebook and Google also operate programs internationally that are exempted from users' data caps — a tactic known somewhat cryptically as "zero rating". Facebook in particular has made "Facebook Zero" not just a sales pitch in developing markets but also part of an Internet.org initiative to expand access "to the two thirds of the world's population that doesn't have it." But a surprising decision in Chile shows what happens when policies of neutrality are applied without nuance. Chile recently put an end to the practice, widespread in developing countries, of big companies "zero-rating" access to their services. "That might seem perverse," says Glyn Moody, "since it means that Chilean mobile users must now pay to access those services, but it is nonetheless exactly what governments that have mandated net neutrality need to do."
Is "data against cap" the same as net neutrality? I don't see the relationship.
I come here for the love
As long as you do it in a non-discriminatory manner (all non-profits (schools, libraries,etc) )
It seems like in this way wikipedia is partnering with the ISP to reduce the cost for the user.
What net neutrality is trying to prevent (as I understand it) is that Google has to pay extra for it's content to be delivered to a customer, while the customer is already paying for that data to be delivered to him.
Essentially, here wikipedia is subsidizing the users internet connection when connecting to wikipedia.
Whereas net neutrality is about not charging companies extra for delivering data to users who already paid.
And what if some competitor of Wikipedia comes in. What if they believe that Wikipedia has some huge bias and are spreading propaganda, and all they want to do is set teh record straight. Well they can't do that very effectively when Wikipedia has already made deals with the Internet companies.
Free information for all is great and all, but Wikipedia does not have a monopoly on that and making their service free ups hurts all other sources of information.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Exactly. But they don't.
The problem is that what FB, Google are currently presenting as "aid" or "development" for underprivileged regions is 1) restricted to their own services and 2) likely to be shut down in the near future on their whim.
If they are serious about development, that's great, but it seems to me there are far less self-interested avenues for them to do so.
Meanwhile these zero-rate programs are just another attempt at re-defining The Internet to be what they have on offer, and probably end up getting in the way of more general availability of the web.
Gosh, thanks. That must be why the other ships call me Meatfucker -- GCU Grey Area (Eccentric)
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No it is not fine with net-neutrality. Setting up one class of users (non-profits) as opposed to other sets of users is violating the core idea of it. Sorry you cant have it both ways. Either all packets are equal (which is frankly stupid given that people want QoS) or some packets are privileged for X reason. Then we have debates about reasons.
If you want to spread internet access to developing countries, how about making internet for free for poor people?
Instead Wiki, Google and Facebook went on the narcistic train and think that those services are more important then any other service.
I personally agree that Wikipedia should be free to access to everyone, but I can recognize that other people might disagree and other people think other services are more important. How about somebody in China makes a competing Wikipedia, or have Wikipedia now the monopoly on online knowledge.
but it is nonetheless exactly what governments that have mandated net neutrality need to do."
Yeah, ensuring the same playing field for all, that what governments *should* do. How about Wiki petition the Chile government to make a free internet for all, and for all services?
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
To me, this is an excellent example of what goes wrong without Net Neutrality. Wikipedia: I can understand and agree with paying to float data caps to share their information. However, Facebook and Google (and any other company using "zero rating") are abusing their power. If a true Facebook or Google competitor could be built within these countries natively, they would be at a severe disadvantage because of the superpowers they're going up against.
I don't think that is disputable. The trouble is how to vet the "Wikipedias" that the public could greatly benefit from and the "Facebooks and Googles" that are using their money to have an unfair advantage over competition?
It is just as bad as any tiered internet.
Just suppose only CNN could afford to offer a Zero-cap and Fox News couldn't find a sponsor for the same, so much humour would be lost on these poor conservatives with a cap!
I am convinced that Internet should be treated as a utility similar to roads, you pay for the infrastructure and there can be a % charge on your data use but all are treated equal.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
It's easy to see how much more valuable access to Wiki is to the average dotter (probably not so much for the Facebook-addicted) and every government would have a differing perspective what was good for their citizens.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Every good law has counterpoints. Traffic signals prevent me from driving through the intersection even when there are no other cars there. Assault laws mean you can't punch someone who talks on their phone at the movies. The right to a trial means we can't just execute people we know are guilty.
One of the other examples I've been hearing lately is about Citizen's United. They say overturning it or passing contradictory legislation could hamper Steven Colbert, or limit the ACLU or EFF. Well, yes, it might. But that would be better, overall, than what we have now.
The goal is not to have laws that capture every nuance. Government is a blunt weapon that must operate in a non-discriminatory fashion. Special cases exist that show the friction in every law. The objective is not for every special case to be efficient, but for the law overall to be efficient.
Last mile providers colluding with incumbents to provide preferential access to consumers harms competition in content. Competition is good in the long run, even for the things we like that may appear to be harmed in the short run. There are natural limitations to competition on carriage, we should not extend those competition limitations to making discriminatory deals with content providers.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
It's toll road vs highwayman.
A toll road is made, and that the road will cost extra is known up front and agreed up front as a means to gain something positive (a new road).
A highway extracts a toll for using a road, but it was neither agreed up front and does not add anything positive to the users.
Giving away Wikipedia to their customers is up to them and is a positive thing, while charging double to access Wikipedia is not up to them, it is not a positive thing and amounts to tortuous interference in business.
See how that works? Dumbing down the Net Neutrality arguments to just those two words won't fool anyone. Verizon and Comcast both slowed down Netflix deliberately while negotiation with them, and it had nothing to do with the available bandwidth and everything to do with tortuous interference in business.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/12/netflix-slow-this-could-be-why_n_4770058.html
You are confusing differentiated pricing with differentiated quality of service. As soon as you make net neutrality into everything-should-be-priced-equally you are getting into weird problems. Would it be against net neutrality for Amazon to discount your network traffic against any purchases? Is free parking for customers against road neutrality?
Yeah, but nobody talking about net neutrality wants all packets to be equal. They want all destinations to be equal, i.e. they want traffic from Netflix to have roughly the same likelihood of reaching its destination as traffic from the cable company's VOD service.
Subsidizing traffic doesn't violate net neutrality, because it doesn't affect the delivery of data, only the cost to the end user. Even if the Internet were regulated in precisely the same way as telephone, subsidized traffic would still be allowed, because it is fundamentally no different than a 1-800 number or a collect call.
So using that as an excuse to argue against net neutrality represents a very fundamental misunderstanding about what net neutrality is about. It isn't about preventing content delivery companies from using the tools at their disposal to deliver content better and faster; it's primarily about preventing content delivery companies who also own last-mile infrastructure from having an unfair competitive advantage over content delivery companies that don't.
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We are not going to get 'net neutrality' in every country, even if it was federally regulated (or passed by congress) There are always going to be some limitations in other parts of the world, just by the distances and bottlenecks in the structure.
(well maybe we could get the new congress and senate to repeal the speed of light limit, along with the laws of thermodynamics.)
... power always goes bad historically, if in doubt see copyright law.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act#mediaviewer/File:Copyright_term.svg
It's hard to say, imagine a world where your data cap is zero, overage is $100/meg, and certain sites don't count. How is that not the same problem as one where providers are being extorted for money if they want people to see their data? And why does it become any different if the data cap is now 500 meg instead of zero? or the overage is $5/meg instead of $100? Adjust the numbers any which way you want, but the whole idea that one company can pay to get access to the customer while another may not be able to afford the same access is where the problem lies, and allowing this paves the way to a future more like cable TV than like a free internet.
... a petition to demand Wikipedia sign on to Net Neutrality. You heard it on Slashdot first.
But, there is a difference between this and charging different data rates to different content providers. This is much closer to charging users different data rates. When the data rate is set by the providers, consumers can't choose to pay for better service.
The use of Wikipedia as an example is propaganda. The real beneficiaries of this practice are commercial companies like Facebook. It allows Facebook to be used for free while other competitive services will cost the user money. And frankly anti-competitive practices like this are an inherent element of success in a world marketplace that depends on excluding effective competition for your product. The internet is not immune to that.
Do they?
I, for one, would rather have net neutrality than QoS.
And I guess most people do not want QoS, they want enough bandwith and low enough latency in general so QoS does not even come into play.
Real life is overrated.
If Wikipedia data is not counted against the data cap, NO data should be counted against the data cap. That way, the playing field will be level and this will be more productive than merely making a free select sites freely accessible.
> They want all destinations to be equal
No - they want all internet connections to be paid for according to last-hop bandwidth to their endpoint and to
work according to the standardized protocols of the internet when sending/recieving data to other destinations from that link,
and for any other business related decisions concerning traffic to occur according to those same principles.
> It isn't about preventing content delivery companies from using the tools at their disposal to deliver content better and faster
Firstly it's not about content delivery companies at all. It's about network operators, and network link pricing. Period.
And yes, when 'the tools at their disposal' include bandwidth tiering (free vs non-free) in an effort to distort end
user preferences towards their internet-based service, and thereby shift the fundamental usage of the
internet itself (away from free, open standards p2p protocols and towards proprietary 'walled-garden' services), this is, in fact,
not a neutral practice, and is in fact a problem.
But I suppose I have a fundamental understanding about what net neutrality is about.
QoS is not the same as net neutrality.
QoS is something that occurs between two specific existing endpoints for a specific connection-oriented application need,
not something that affects the pricing of the establishment of those endpoints in aggregate for a specific business-oriented need.
one sham argument, among many.
... the real problem is data caps!
Wikipedia might have simply made a compromise between ideology and pragmatism.
Internet connectivity in the USA might be crappy in a lot of places, but at least a connection is available almost anywhere. The problems are mostly in the capacity of the network and how to fairly and efficiently use or improve that capacity. This makes net neutrality an important issue in the west.
In developing nations, the situation is very different. Networks are only now being built and access is still rare and expensive, while many people do not have that much money to spend. The main problems here are not capacity for luxury services but basic access to information. The concept of net neutrality will likely become important in these places later on, but right now, there are simply more pressing issues taking priority. It's like Maslow's hierarchy of needs, but different.
The world is not black and white. The best solution/ideology in one situation may not be the best in another.
having wasted several years of my life on queuing mechanisms and control protocols
for QOS, I can assure you thats not what people should want.
if you look at the question more broadly as providers deciding how they
want to offer the internet to you vs you paying for general access to the internet -
QOS could be relevant on both sides, and from a net neutrality perspective
should really just be 'how i want to manage the traffic across my access link'
Wot?
They come begging me to sponsor them, and then they use my money to give some faraway guy, whose pay has - relatively - risen 10 times as much as mine over the last 15 years, FREE INTERNET?
Sorry.. in what way does Wikipedia Zero being acceptable imply Facebook Zero is acceptable? How are we presuming that country X can't make its own decision about what is reasonable? In the US, net neutrality is an answer to Comcast's market power, but also part of web companies' campaigns to shift power to them and away from ISPs and public concern over market power in the opposite direction (regulate THOSE guys, THEY'RE the bad ones). Outside of the US, isn't it interesting that those same companies have no regard for that principle? Did they change their minds because of pure self-interest or because they felt that net neutrality wasn't the most important social issue. Hey.. I don't know. Go ask them. Still, net neutrality as an inviolable principle may not make sense in every country, because the market failures it's addressing may be different. Wikipedia's view isn't necessarily wrong simply because it is complicated. Net neutrality isn't a fundamentally perfect principle. Feel free to give your cash to the EFF if you disagree with me -- they'll find something good to do with it, I'm sure.
OTOH, if you still remember how amazing Wikipedia is and want everyone in the world to be able to benefit from it, don't think your support for them will have any effect on regulation in the US. It won't. The FCC's concern is what happens in the US.
Part of me agrees with you, but then I think about how much real-world useful information is available on wikipedia - stuff that can make a significant difference to the life of an intelligent person for whom even a $30 monthly internet bill would represent a large slice of their income. Or how valuable, in a business sense, social networking services such as Facebook can be for impoverished community trying to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. And I think that maybe the humanitarian benefits in such a situation outweigh the damage done by anti-competitive business practices. In certain situations. For now.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Either all packets are equal (which is frankly stupid given that people want QoS) or some packets are privileged for X reason. Then we have debates about reasons.
If people want QoS they should enable it on their own routers. It should not be done by ISPs.
The pipes / tubes should be as dumb as possible; all intelligence of the network should be as close to the edges as possible.
Maybe I'm not understanding the full picture, but data caps seems like a farce to me; at least in the U.S. They put the data caps in place, claiming their networks cannot handle the load, then make some of the most data-hogging apps such as streaming music exempt from them? What am I missing here?
Is "data against cap" the same as net neutrality? I don't see the relationship.
I live in one of the two countries where a pilot program from Internet.org was tested, namely, that traffic to and from Facebook (later also extended to WhatsApp) doesn't add to your data cap. The way it works is that the mobile operator inspects the traffic (nothing too deep, just checks whether the connected endpoint IPs belong to a whitelist) and if the traffic comes from FB or WhatsApp, it's "free" (as it does not use your quota). This is of course discrimination by origin, and it goes against net neutrality. I myself was always FOR net neutrality, but I'm aware this kind of initiatives (which by the way is mandated by the ISP regulation in my country) would suffer if N.N. is fully enforced.
I don't have a sig.
and promotes more total and more entrenched network-effect monopolies.
If you came up with a way better peer to peer movie sharing site that had better quality and paid the actors and director directly through a tip jar which also funded their next productions (just throw the business process patent my way now, I won't even bother applying :-), you woudn't have a fair chance to compete, because the Flixazon competitor's product would be free for the users and you couldn't get into the market.
And because their's was free to end users, network bandwidth would be swamped with use of their service, leaving only low quality fits and starts of movie streaming for you.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Just as with "Hope and Change", "Comprehensive Immigration Reform", "The Affordable Care Act", the "North American Free Trade Agreement" etc, "Net Neutrality" is a clever simpleton-targeting scheme that some very well-educated and well-funded folks use to sell a big leap in goverenment control that will certainly lead to all sorts of bad consequences to a general public that does not want to be bothered with the details. Average people are supposed to be manipulated into thinking this is a grass-roots movement by the folks to fight-off "Big Telcos", like the ACA was supposedly to protect people from "Big Insurance" - but the TRUTH is that billions of bollars are on the line and so there are huge powerful interests on all sides of these fights. The big insurance companies helped write the ACA and are now reaping massive profits as all Americans are now ordered to buy their products (which now include "Bronze" plans specifically-designed to rip-off young people who supported the ACA (add-up the premiums, and the deductibles and co-pays and consider if you would go broke BEFORE the plan actually kicks in if you become truly sick...)). With "net neutrality", there are people who will build themselves illegitimate financial empires off of the maket distortions caused by all the rules and regulations - entire new lobbying firms will arise to influence all the rules and regulations that anonymous government regulators will write once they have authority over the net (and there will be even more reason to bribe/"contribute to campaigns of" members of congress to get loopholes written to re-enforce or get around various rules and regs)
Average people who bought the rehtoric THOUGHT "health care reform" would be lots of free great things - they did not anticipate the destruction of the 40 hour work week, the additional pressure on job providers suppressing employment, the millions of people already dumped from policies they were promised they could keep and the wave of problems ahead as all bad the parts Obama delayed "with his pen" until after the 2014 midterms now begin to kick-in (like the employer mandates and the union health plans being re-classed as "cadillac plans")
Average people did not realize, but are now becoming aware, that the immigration nonesense is now opening the spigots of social security funds to illegals at a time when Social Security is already going to go broke before all the Baby Boomers die off - making the failure even faster. They also did not realize that the illegals are not covered by the ACA mandates and it will now be about $3K per year cheaper for employers to hire them than to hire citizens.
the ACA (Obamacare) was about 1K pages long, but then federal regulators nobody elected and who are completely unaccountable wrote about 30K pages of regulations. People who fall for simple slogans seem to think that a "net neutrality" law will be passed with only a few hundred pages and are apparently so gullible that they somehow imagine there will not be thousands of pages of internet regulations written by bureaucrats armed with the new federal authority to regulate the internet. This issue of data caps is just a HINT that most people are not paying attention to all the peripheral matters that would be affected by their dreamed-of law and its tidal wave of new internet rules and regulations.
The internet got to be what it is today WITHOUT "net neutrality" and there are people in Washington DC who are dreaming of the day "the people" give them the lawful authority to begin "regulating" it - for the children, of course...
Why are you upset by Citizens United?
Most on the left seem to shriek about the evils of "corporate personhood" and demand that corporations have no right to spend money on political messages - but before Citizens United I never heard a single person on the left make that complaint while the huge unions (which are all incorporated, and therefore "corporate persons") poured huge sums of cash into politics as well as huge amounts of free (and un-recorded) work by their union members. In Democrat-dominated places like Chicago, the unions have negotiated deals with the Democrats in city hall that give some unionized government workers paid days off (at taxpayer expense) to do political work - which means the Democrats are making all taxpayers fund Democrat campaigns. These massive piles of campaign contributions rose to become the largest piles of campaign cash in many states. Before Citizens United, the labor unions coud get away with what all corporations can now do based on a legal loophole Democrats put into the tax code many years ago which assign unions to a different part of the tax code. This was also an item in the IRS vs TEA Party fight; the unions have been doing for decades what the TEA Partiers only recently applied to do - but the TEA Partiers were under parts 501(C)(3) and 501(C)(4) whereas the unions had their own little section most taxpayers and voters were unware of: 501(c)(5) and to which the IRS was not interested in applying any enforcement.
This opposition to Citizens United just seems to be that the ruling got in the way of the "ends justify the means" politics of progressives who tolerate any level of corruption as long as it is on their side and contributes to their goals but then goes into a frenzy of outrage if the other side tries to level the playing field. This was put to the extreme test several months ago when the Democrats in the Senate proposed amending the 1st Amendment (as an attempt to "fire-up the base") and counted on the Republicans blocking them..........and then Harry Reid was outraged that the GOP did not block it and Dems were left with egg on teir face as the thing actually headed to the floor for a vote with Democrats facing the prospect of going on the record in a party-line vote to repeal parts of the 1st Amendment. Harry had to pull it and he lost the political benefit.
Add this rule to Adblock+ and relax
I want my games and voip to be low latency, but not necessarily high bandwidth. I want my streaming content to be very high bandwidth but I don't care if it's got even a multi-second latency.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
instead of a single destination not counting against caps they could get together and make all search engines not count or all .orgs or whatever. as long as all players in a class of services are covered the net remains neutral.
Amazon and Netflix could cover all paid video services until they hit a certain monetary metric then they would also have to contribute. new players are in effect on a neutral net until they are one of the big boys and can contribute. This would not be an actual neutral net as other sites would count against caps, but as long as entire sectors were treated equal the consumer sees the benefits of both a non neutral and neutral net while providers are in an almost neutral net scenario.
Net Neutrality, just like freedom of speech, or any other broad principle, has some downsides. But ultimately the good vastly outweighs the bad.
Yeah, but nobody talking about net neutrality wants all packets to be equal. They want all destinations to be equal.
If travelling to one destination does not count against your data cap, then that destination is not on equal footing.
Subsidizing traffic doesn't violate net neutrality, because it doesn't affect the delivery of data, only the cost to the end user.
It does violate net neutrality, because it affects the cost of delivery of data to and from the end user.
What Wikipedia is doing here is a good thing by itself, but if the practice were to become commonplace, it's something that would be very bad.
It's not an ideal. It's not even optimal. There are arguments for imbalance. Net neutrality is a solution to a problem in the US- that of a small cartel having undue control over the internet.
There are reasons you might want to have a two tier internet, and even if there aren't it's not impossible that we might want them in the future. Most countries there's enough competition for this to self regulate to a degree.
That is
The worst haiku I have ever seen in my life
Winter
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
So if the cable ISP treats all internet traffic except Netflix and Amazon Instant Video as "premium" which falls into your "premium" quota of 50GB per month, their VOD as unlimited quota, and all the rest (which leaves only Netflix and Amazon) has a quota of 1GB and an overage fee of $1/MB. That in your opinion is fully compliant with net neutrality?
You can't expect them to make a decision one way or the other. Have you never heard of WP:NPOV?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
"We have a complicated relationship to it. We believe in net neutrality in America," said Gayle Karen Young, chief culture and talent officer at the Wikimedia Foundation. But, Young added, offering Wikipedia Zero requires a different perspective elsewhere. "Partnering with telecom companies in the near term, it blurs the net neutrality line in those areas. It fulfills our overall mission, though, which is providing free knowledge."
Let me state things clearly. These {facebook|wikipedia|whatever}.zero campaigns are a direct and unequivocal attack on Net Neutrality. They are the brainchild of some very smart, cynical people who know exactly how insidious the whole idea is, and whose job it is to set Open Data people against Open Networks people.
This is not an unintended consequence. This is the consequence.
My part of the world consists pretty much entirely of developing nations, and when we discussed these zero initiatives, we pretty quickly came to the conclusion that having offline versions of wikipedia (commonly available) was a more desirable thing than having a zero-cost version of it mediated by our friendly neighbourhood telco.
And Facebook zero was scoffed at when it was touted as a social Good.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
I can't speak to Facebook, et. al., but please don't lump Wikipedia Zero into your attack above, it's a very different animal. WP Zero is the brainchild of some very smart, idealistic people whose primary mission in life is to spread as much free information around the globe as possible, and that in turn is just a facet of a deeper ideal that information is empowering, and lack of information is oppressive.
I know some of the individuals involved in the WP Zero movement from the get-go. These are the in-the-trenches activists. They physically went to these developing nations to examine the situation because they saw a disturbing trend in their own analytical data: the most oppressed people on the planet, who had the most to gain from free information, were not taking advantage of Wikipedia's free information as much as expected.
What they found on the ground was that in many of these developing nations, school-aged children and young adults had access to cell phones (but usually not tablets or home computers), and these cell phones had browsers and data capabilities, but the carriers are charging an arm and a leg for bytes of data over the cellular network, and that's why they're not surfing Wikipedia (or anything else much either). These are kids that are trying to go to high school and college, these are the potential future generation's leaders who want to learn and grow and think their way out of some big societal issues, but they don't even have a good supply of textbooks, or physical libraries.
Wikipedia's information could be a huge learning aid for them if they could afford the bits and bytes to receive it (for that matter, also to contribute information to it about their own localities, which increases the global interconnection of information and raises awareness of local issues in these developing nations elsewhere).
Now sure, Facebook and such are looking at the same data in the same way, and coming to the same basic conclusions (strike a deal for free data!), but the difference of motive here is very critical. Facebook sees this as "These are eyeballs we could expand our advertising to and gather marketing data from, so for profit motives we need to capture these eyeballs by striking a zero-rating deal with the carriers". Wikipedia sees it as "These are eyeballs that hunger for the liberating power of information, and we need to do whatever we can to give it to them".
It's easy to fault the carriers for the high data costs in the first place, but you have to understand *why* they charge so much data: it's really really expensive to build and maintain wireless data infrastructure in some of these areas where even power infrastructure is hard to come by, and technical employees to do the work are also hard to come by in a relatively uneducated society. Their costs are high, and they have to make money not lose it.
The way Wikipedia sells the developing-nation carriers the zero-rating idea is this: (1) It's in your country's best interests if your population becomes more educated, because then the country will prosper, and you as a telecom carrier in that country will also prosper as a result, (2) It's in your specific company's interests to educate the populace because you're sorely hurting for being able to hire local expertise instead of foreign outsiders to do hard technical jobs in building and maintaining your network, and (3) In exchange for Zero-rating Wikipedia's data, Wikipedia is willing to run a small banner at the top of the delivered pages saying something to the affect of "Wikipedia is provided to you free of mobile data charges by XYZ Carrier Inc", which increases public goodwill towards your company and thus may increase your subscriber base. and of course (4) It's the right thing to do, but the other 3 points are bigger sellers to these businesses.
The WP Zero campaign has been a huge success, and has helped many thousands of people in developing nations gain access to a huge trove of data they would otherwise have *no* access to. It's very,
Well sure but that world of effectively infinite bandwidth with low latency is not going to happen at least not soon. Latency has for many routes been going up slightly as traffic increases. For the next decade or two QoS matters.
Which is precisely the same thing as saying that traffic priority should not be dependent upon endpoint—i.e. that all destinations are treated equally—but with about forty-two extra words.
Network operators are a pipe to content providers, so any definition of net neutrality that ignores the content providers is fundamentally missing the whole point of the network. The purpose of net neutrality is to ensure that your link provider cannot artificially distort traffic in a way that makes it impractical to use arbitrary services, forcing you to the services of their choosing. Manipulating network link pricing is just one mechanism for distorting traffic, and is quite possibly the least interesting, least effective way to do so.
Your argument is illogical. There is no difference between a content provider paying for the user's data usage and lowering the price of the content provider's service by enough money that the user can pay for a connection with a higher data cap on his or her own. Thus, paying for the user's usage does not violate any fundamentally sound concept of net neutrality in any meaningful way. Admittedly, in the case of Wikipedia, they're taking it one step farther and charging a negative fee for their service, which is a little odd, but if that's the way they want to spend their donations, so be it.
Now taken to the extreme—unusably low data caps combined with provider-paid exceptions—could potentially be a net neutrality issue, if only because it would be harmful to free content providers. However, that scenario is pretty darn unlikely. There are too many dozens of free, moderately high-traffic content providers for that to happen in the foreseeable future. If that changes—if all the world's websites consolidated themselves into just a handful of server farms—then it would make sense to reevaluate things. Unless and until that happens, however, it makes little sense to create laws in an attempt to prevent problems that are purely hypothetical. Doing so adds extra regulatory burden without solving actual problems, and worse, gives businesses more time to look for ways around those regulations, ensuring that by the time they are actually needed, they don't work.
And more importantly, none of the proposed solutions for net neutrality that I've seen would prevent this sort of "collect calling" anyway.
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If every other website on the Internet besides Netflix and Amazon pays a fee to be included in that "premium" quota, then yes, it is consistent with Net Neutrality. It is also about as likely as Santa Claus getting the Tooth Fairy pregnant.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
But it doesn't. The cost is still the same, regardless of who is paying it. What it does is shift the burden, at the request of one of the parties. That's not the same as shifting the burden at the request of someone who isn't a party to the communication (your ISP). And changing the cost of the communication isn't really any different from changing the cost of the content. If Apple (for example) chooses to pay your bandwidth bill for downloading a movie, they could lower the cost of the movie by a few bucks and it would have exactly the same effect on the customer in practice. In fact, they would probably be better served by lowering the price, because customers see the price of the movie, and probably pay for their bandwidth bill using auto-debit. :-)
Either way, the TCP/IP equivalent of toll-free calling certainly isn't in the same category of wrongness as your ISP limiting the rate of traffic in a way that makes your communication impossible or impractical, and the reason most of us want net neutrality is to prevent that sort of abuse, not to prevent any slight distortion of pricing.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
If you want to QoS, do it on your own network, QoS should NOT be on the Internet.
The funny thing is latency and bandwidth go hand-in-hand as long as you don't have buffer bloat. You should NEVER get high latency, only packet-loss. When I overload my connection, my latency skyrockets into the 20ms range, then I promptly get packet-loss. If you're having issues with bulk data transfers, then limit them or get a faster connection.
I can't speak to Facebook, et. al., but please don't lump Wikipedia Zero into your attack above, it's a very different animal. WP Zero is the brainchild of some very smart, idealistic people whose primary mission in life is to spread as much free information around the globe as possible, and that in turn is just a facet of a deeper ideal that information is empowering, and lack of information is oppressive.
Whose brainchild, specifically? I'm very interested in knowing. Because I think you'll find that the idea did not originate in Wikipedia, but that it was presented to them by others.
I know some of the individuals involved in the WP Zero movement from the get-go. These are the in-the-trenches activists. They physically went to these developing nations to examine the situation because they saw a disturbing trend in their own analytical data: the most oppressed people on the planet, who had the most to gain from free information, were not taking advantage of Wikipedia's free information as much as expected.
I hope you'll forgive my cynicism, but 'physically going' to the developing world teaches very little indeed about the broader truths of living in poverty. I say this having lived the last 11 years in a Least Developed Country, and having worked for half a generation with a parade of well-intended people who, to put it bluntly, haven't got a fucking clue, but who suck up all the oxygen in the room, making it impossible to get real, meaningful work done.
Do I sound bitter? Yes. I believe I've earned that right. Does that diminish my determination to work on real issues? Not one iota.
What they found on the ground was that in many of these developing nations, school-aged children and young adults had access to cell phones (but usually not tablets or home computers), and these cell phones had browsers and data capabilities, but the carriers are charging an arm and a leg for bytes of data over the cellular network, and that's why they're not surfing Wikipedia (or anything else much either).
Yes, and instead of helping to fight this phenomenon through better policy and changed attitudes among the global institutions, what we get instead is people perpetuating the problem by empowering the very telcos who prey on those children.
Let's be perfectly clear about this: asking telcos to make a special exception for one or two services is probably the worst possible response to the situation. It's short-sighted, it generates little real benefit, and worst of all, it creates the impression that people are actually doing something, when they're doing less than the minimum needed to move the development markers.
You can defend these people all you like. I still maintain that:
a) They were misguided and wrong; and
b) The basic idea was inspired and promoted by a number of very cynical individuals to a bunch of very naïve (if well-intentioned) people with little meaningful experience in actual development work.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Wikipedia like The Koch brothers understand that to enforce net neutrality is to be marxist.
So, if the data cost to access Wikipedia for these people is waived, then who is picking up that cost? That's right, the paying customers, like me. And if a competitor to Wikipedia comes along and they want to reach those people, they will have a tough time convincing them to consume their data vs using Wikipedia for free. This may drive competitors out of certain markets or even out of business. So in the end I, the paying customer, would be paying more for less choice and dumping on the net neutrality principals I believe in so that strangers in another county can have free access to one, uncontested source of information for an unknown amount of time? No thank you. Net neutrality is absolute. It is a principal that must be respected to keep the internet a useful tool, and not a selective data stream controlled by the highest bidder. It just amazes me how organizations like Wikipedia that were born out of a neutral internet are so ready to abandon those principals as soon as they don't fit their own personal goals.
Let's look at it another way in a hypothetical example. If I was just barely able to afford a limited internet connection, and Wikipedia was just one of my choices on where to wisely spend my data, then all of a sudden Wikipedia didn't cost me anything to use and I was tempted to just use them for all my info, I would get worried that I was being spoon fed what Wikipedia wanted me to see and that I was not getting objective information. Then I might look for verification only to find none because other services can't reach me because Wikipedia's deal put them out of business in my area. In other words, I would rather have a limited amount of data that I can choose to use with multiple sources than an unlimited amount of data from only 1 source.
I have always thought Wikipedia was great, but I respect them a little less now for this behavior, whether is was just shortsightedness or a blatant disregard for the hand that fed them.