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.

Comments

Re:He's wrong of course

[PopeRatzo]

Disagree. Let's say I'm AT&T and I notice that one of my backbone connections is much more saturated than another. To the point where traffic over that connection is effectively bandwidth throttled. I collect some stats and notice that a disproportionate amount of traffic over that pipe is, say, Netflix, but not all. This has happened "organically" without my trying to charge Netflix and/or intentionally give them the shaft. Does the principle of net neutrality obligate me to upgrade that pipe when I might otherwise choose not to do so? Etc

No, what obligates them to "upgrade the pipe" is that the Netflix traffic represents users who are paying customers. Now, they might decide, "Fuck those Netflix users, we're not upgrading shit" but then those paying customers can decide, "Let's see what kind of deal I can get from Comcast".

Because a critical part of any Net Neutrality discussion is competition, and the implicit threat that broadband should be a public utility anyway.

Neutrality only when it applies to someone else

[AndroSyn]

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.

Net neutrality is a band-aid

[Solandri]

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.

Re:WP:OBLIGATORY

[dgatwood]

-Zuckerberg and Wales want to give poor people in the third world free access to the a massive chunk of human knowledge and instant worldwide communication.

Now let's analyze what's wrong with that. Facebook is a for-profit company whose business model depends on being able to communicate with anyone through their service. Therefore, their efforts to enable people to access Facebook are entirely self-serving. That means that they aren't noble or generous at all, but rather strategic.

Now if Facebook's funding also benefitted every other social network from the tiniest site all the way up through Google+, I would consider that philanthropy. As long as it only benefits them, it isn't really benefitting the poor, because the perceived benefits are balanced out by limiting their future access to other competing services and reducing competition that will eventually provide improvements that they care about.

The same argument holds for Wikipedia, even though there's no profit motive. Imagine if every time somebody threatened to fork Wikipedia to push them to fix governance issues, Wikipedia said, "Yeah, but a third of your potential audience won't even consider going to your competing site because it will cost them money." So market manipulation on behalf of Wikipedia will have a chilling effect on dissidence.

So no, net neutrality isn't complicated. Manipulating the price of Internet service in favor of specific companies or organizations always comes with a price. The notion that something is better than nothing might be true in the short term, but it has very real long-term consequences.