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Net Neutrality Is Complicated: Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales (indiatimes.com)
In an interview, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales backed the principle of Net neutrality, but added that enabling poor people to access the Internet is equally important. Wales also defended Wikipedia Zero, a project that aims to provide select services free of cost on mobile devices in developing markets. He said :Wikipedia Zero follows a very strict set of principles such as no money is ever exchanged and so on. Net neutrality is such a complicated topic, it is something that I am extremely passionate about and I think is incredibly important. And at the same time I think getting access to knowledge for poorest people of world is also very important. Sometimes those two things can be in tension and we have to be really careful about it. I think fundamental thing is that we maintain and open and free Internet.
Net neutrality is actually very simple. He just opposes it,
You are all TOS reciting cows. The TOS goes as follows: Mooooo! Mooooo! Mooooo Cows Mooooo! Mooooooo says the TOS. MOOOOOOO! YOU BONELESS COWS!!!!
[citation needed]
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
... getting poor people to access the Internet is equally important.
"Getting" or "enabling" ? The former sounds like it's for your benefit, the latter for theirs. Which is Jimmy - and Mark (Zuckerberg).
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
But controlling what and how the available knowledge is presented is even more important. In the early days, I was an enthusiastic Wikipedia fan. Now, not so much. For many subjects, it is a good enough starting point for further research. For any political topics, or ones that have even a hint of controversy about them, though, it's pretty much useless at best, and at worst its straight up propaganda.
I can't recommend this highly enough.
Insightful TED talk
Can we drop this irksome journalistic anti-pattern, please?
Jimbo-boi either is in cahoots with teh zuck or completely hasn't understood what he's on about; the "getting poor on the internet" shtick is nothing of the sort, but about walled gardens. Net neutrality wouldn't allow that, so in the long run, yes, even poor people will be better off with net neutrality rather than teh zuck's walled garden, with nice little stalls for a few well-paying friends of his. "It's free", teh zuck says, but it remains a walled up garden that you have to pay to get out of. That's no true access, that's no more than a pacifier and an extortion scam for those tired of the pacifier. Extortion of poor people. Isn't that nice, helping poor people like that? Jimbo-boi seems to think so.
The thing is that the internet has always been cooperative, I scratch your back you scratch mine. That's gotten muddled with the flood of AOLers and the consumerist "ISP" thing. Walled gardens are against that, and so are not the true internet. If jimbo-boi doesn't get that, feather and tar him and run him out of town. And give teh zuck a nice feathered tar coat to go with it, please.
It seems like the best thing ever, but I pretty much just browse slashdot, which isn't the best thing ever. Like I know you can learn tons of stuff and better yourself via the internet, but that doesn't happen often.
The Internet is like freeways. Do you prioritize traffic on freeways? Yes, for emergency services only.
When, for example, my phone provider doesn't charge me for bandwidth to Wikipedia, they are putting money in his pocket since their customers will be more likely to go to Wikipedia. That is the reason he is biased. It's about the money.
Talk about a double talking weasel. Net neutrality(why don't we call it net neutering instead?) is great when it applies to somebody else, but fuck you if you want me to play by the same rules.
Fuck you guy, just fuck you.
The fundamental problem here is that one group's wants and desires (the end-users') are being suppressed. This came about because nearly all local governments granted a monopoly to a single cable service provider. They were well intentioned - often making 99.9% coverage and bandwidth limits a condition of that monopoly. But at the same time they discounted or didn't believe in the market influence of competition, so didn't give much consideration to the harm that granting a monopoly - even a regulated monopoly - does.
Once the cable companies had the monopoly, they could basically ignore end-users' desires, thus depriving them of their voice in the ISP market. On top of that, they are now empowered because they are the only means of internet access to those customers. All the power of those customers' dollars, none of the drawbacks of having to listen to what those customers want! And they chose to leverage that power by trying to extort additional money from websites to deliver content that their customers had already paid them for.
Net neutrality is a band-aid to try to fix this problem. By prohibiting different pricing based on content source, it prevents this type of extortion. But like the original monopoly regulatory kludge, it kills off another aspect of the market - differential pricing based on the cost to actually deliver that content. If Netflix is streaming content to the ISP, that's a lot of bandwidth and so costs the ISP a lot of money. If Netflix installs content servers at the ISP, that eliminates the bandwidth consumption and so costs the ISP less money. But net neutrality essentially prohibits the ISP from passing that cost savings on to the customer. The ISP has to charge the same price for all content, regardless of source and the bandwidth cost to obtain data from that source. It's just one regulatory fix which mostly but not entirely works, trying to fix another regulatory fix which mostly but not entirely works.
The ultimate solution is to restore market power to the end-user. Let them vote with their dollars. This has the advantage of pitting dynamic human minds against any tricks the ISPs try to come up with to increase prices or degrade service. Right now we're trying to fight the ISPs' tricks using static laws, which take decades to implement in response to their previous tricks, giving them plenty of time to figure out new tricks.
Abolish the cable monopolies. Convert the monopoly into a tightly regulated service contact for the physical cable or fiber which runs to the homes, and only the physical cables. No content service allowed. The cable maintenance company then makes money by leasing bandwidth along that fiber to different ISPs at a fixed (regulated) rate. The ISPs then have to compete with each other based on quality of service and price. If an ISP tries to pull a Comcast and deliberately degrades Netflix, they will hemorrhage customers as they flee to a different ISP who isn't degrading Netflix. And they'll do it in a matter of weeks or months, not the years or decades it took to get Net Neutrality implemented. This is how we regulate utilities, and oddly enough this is how "socialist" Europe does it.
To borrow an expression used in a discussion about USENET of old: You're conflating "use of the net" and "use on the net". Net neutrality is exactly everyone can use the network just like everyone else, without prejudice or premium subscription required.
The whole teh zuck+frends "internet.org" walled garden-shtick breaks that "use of the net": You're blocked and no longer a first class citizen able to have your traffic passed like everyone else. You're chattel, beholden to your freemium subscription you can't pay for because you're poor so you're stuck in a situation where some of your traffic is passed, but not all. This ultimately holds you back and indeed long-term causes an increase in the premium required to get out.
This says nothing about whether some hosts will refuse to serve you unless you pay ("use on the net"): The internet was designed as and so far still is cooperative at its traffic-passing fundament. That this also has implications on how much people are willing to pay for content, typically not very much at all, is something else again. Net neutrality is about the traffic, not the content. You should not have to pay extra for your traffic depending on destination and teh zuck's "internet.org" walled garden breaks this. This devolves into him trying to own the poor.
Jimbo-boi apparently doesn't see this, and apparently neither do you, or you think it "the right perspective". I say that if you do indeed think that you need to think about it more, for example until you understand what the internet was built to do. Hint: It wasn't built to let teh zuck own the poor.
Its the simplest possible way to operate network devices. Your home router is (for the most part) net-neutral and all you have to do is plug the thing in.
The problem is that nobody actually wants net neutrality. And that's where it gets hard because service providers want neutrality broken in a different way than service users (and of course no two of anybody wants it broken in exactly the same way, but definitely some generalizations can be drawn.)
Service providers want to be able to charge a premium for every single bit (and often double-charge cause you know, there's two ends to that connection!) So they want to do things like the internet fast lane to force Google and Microsoft and whoever else to pay through the teeth (and they couldn't care less about Ma's Awesome Quilts from bumfuckit nowhere because the premium Google will pay for prioritizing Youtube covers the revenue they get from hundreds or thousands of those small sites.
Users on the other hand want things to be affordable and, in many cases far more importantly, to just bloody work right. We want VOIP prioritized no matter what VOIP service we use. We want all streaming music and video to be prioritized over download-only content such as bittorrent. And at the same time, we don't want you to just throttle bittorrent completely because when we're not on a VOIP call, we want the bandwidth to be available for anything else we're doing.
Those two sets of priorities are occasionally in sync to some degree -- as long as Youtube and Netflix and a few other "big" video sites are fast, we don't really care so much about the smaller ones. I mean we do in principle but not so much in practice really because for things like music and video, the available content is far more important than the brand name or even the price. If I make some dumbass little video site and can't afford a fast lane, people will still come providing I have some unique content that can't be found elsewhere. I might lose a couple of percent due to slow load times but for the most part, people will still suffer through a shitty buffering cycle if they really want to watch the video.
VOIP providers are a totally opposite example though. There are innumerable VOIP providers out there of all shapes and sizes, and as long as the thing works, they're all essentially equivalent. So if Skype is shelling out big bucks for the fast lane and I can't afford to do that when I roll out my little VOIP package, I'm basically screwed.
So that's the overall issue. How to make everybody happy (or at least not completely pissed off) is a whole other story because the VOIP example is far and away the more common scenario. And of course it has to be written in strict legal fashion because its super easy to tilt the board (accidentally or otherwise) in favor of the big providers. We're very lucky that in this particular fight, there's big users as well (Google, Netflix, etc.) They obviously have different desires again from your average home user but the debate has been framed in the context of "full neutrality" vs "ISP-favored non-neutrality" with not much grey area or coloring outside the lines, so all end users are kind of getting grouped up into one lump sum and leaves us with some gorillas of our own for once.
ISPs won't take Netflix's Open Connect Appliances, which are 4U in size, because Netflix is unwilling to lease 4U of rack space in the ISPs' data centers.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And Wikipedia's deletionist admins violate net neutrality by ownly letting "free" articles go to "notable" subjects, making the "not notable" use the ad laden Wikia.
Wikipedia keeps demanding more donations despite sitting on a pile of cash. They don't use that cash to fix their flawed and disreputable editor network that leads to grotesquely skewed wikipedia pages.
Wales now wants to use that cash to push that agenda ridden view of society onto people AND not provide them with access to alternate sources of information that might actually challenge the narrative and offer some semblance of truth?
Fuck Jimmy Wales, fuck his view of net neutrality and fuck the idiots that keep giving Wikipedia money.
God dammit, is it time to donate again? I don't want to but I'm afraid of Jimmy.
Translation: The 'vendors' (because they're not getting money) that our subscribers can't avoid inside our walled ecosystem, will not prevent net neutrality.
Didn't Facebook try this in India and get their hand slapped?
For every problem, there is a solution that's simple, easy, and wrong.
> Traffic can be managed at the end points.
Netflix IS an endpoint of Comcast's network. There is a router at which Comcast's network ends. Netlfix wants to plug in to Comcast's network and dump billions of dollars of traffic. Comcast wants to do as you suggest and manage that endpoint.
Netflix just has to pay for its bandwidth. The amount of data is completely irrelevant. It's not complicated.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The ISP isn't Netflix's customer if Netflix's transit provider "would abuse settlement free peering links" by sending far more traffic in one direction than it receives in the other.
Don't confuse net neutrality, the concept with "Net Neutrality", the plan created by the FCC and the Obama administration. They are two completely different things.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7WHoqsRuxU