11 ms·

Wikimedia doesn't support Net Neutrality

40 points by bifrost 9y ago

johnhenry 9y ago
Prioritizing traffic based on ISP preference isn't necessarily a bad thing in all cases; it's just particularly dangerous when ISPs have a monopoly.
- kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
  > ... when ISPs have a monopoly. Or they collude to keep fees artificially high. Witness the disparity between American and European cellular plan rates. They all just happened to decide that we can't have sub-$30 plans despite "competition".
  - johnhenry 9y ago
    Sorry, I wasn't clear. ISPs tend to have monopolies over specific areas orchestrated by an oligopoly that they have over the industry as a whole. Either way there isn't competition, and net-neutrality laws are necessary in this case for a free and open internet. Otherwise, if actual competition did exist, net-neutrality rules wouldn't matter so much.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
    Yep. There's a reason that the laws are called antitrust laws.
  - kuschku 9y ago
    This is especially striking when you compare Germany and Denmark, two countries bordering another, and a truly unlimited plan in DK is available at 16€/month, and in Germany at 190€/month
  - dboreham 9y ago
    >Witness the disparity between American and European cellular plan rates. I spend a fair bit of time in Europe and since I'm Scottish by birth I devote an unreasonable amount of time trying to find the cheapest decent cell service. Something about this didn't jive so I did a quick check: Picking France as an example European country, Orange will sell you a 2G/Unlimited voice/SMS plan[1] for 25 Euro/mo. Meanwhile Verizon will charge you $35/mo for a similar 2G/unlimited voice plan[2]. Current $/Euro exchange rage is 1.2 so the French service ($30) is a little cheaper but not significantly. Also in my experience service in Europe is generally less good in terms of coverage and QoS than we experience in the US. YMMV of course. [1] https://boutique.orange.fr/mobile/forfaits-orange https://boutique.orange.fr/mobile/forfaits-orange [2] https://www.verizonwireless.com/plans/verizon-plan/ https://www.verizonwireless.com/plans/verizon-plan/
rgbrenner 9y ago
reading wikipedia blog post: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/08/01/wikipedia-zero-and-net-neutrality-protecting-the-internet/ https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/08/01/wikipedia-zero-and-net... "We believe that free access to public interest resources can be provided in a manner that keeps the playing field level and avoids net neutrality issues." The program is partnering with carriers to give away access to Wikipedia (although no money is exchanged between the carrier and Wikipedia). It doesn't sound like it avoids NN issues. Giving away access to a certain website.. sounds exactly like an NN issue. And I don't think Wikipedia's competitors would think this "keeps the playing field level" either. How would they compete against Wikipedia, when their users have to pay to access their service, but dont have to pay to access wikipedia? Wasn't this the same issue we had with Facebook's Zero program in India?
- tzs 9y ago
  > The program is partnering with carriers to give away access to Wikipedia (although no money is exchanged between the carrier and Wikipedia). It doesn't sound like it avoids NN issues. Giving away access to a certain website.. sounds exactly like an NN issue. > And I don't think Wikipedia's competitors would think this "keeps the playing field level" either. How would they compete against Wikipedia, when their users have to pay to access their service, but dont have to pay to access wikipedia? I disagree for two reasons: • First, as a matter of general principle I prefer to minimize overlap of different regulatory frameworks. We have a general framework for dealing with anticompetitive actions and practices--antitrust law. If for some reason antitrust law cannot deal with competition issues that zero rating Wikipedia cause, let's beef up antitrust law to deal with it. Same goes for some other areas that are often included in net neutrality, such as privacy and transparency. I don't want a separate law for these things for each kind of business. They are general things that should be independent of type of business. (I'm open to arguments that it is politically impossible to get a good general privacy law, for instance, passed and so we may have to settle for doing these things on a type of business by type of businesses basis in things like net neutrality regulations). • Second, most of what an ISP could accomplish with zero rating could be accomplished by other means that would be less efficient but not use the internet (and so completely avoid any possibility of net neutrality issues), but would have largely the same impact on consumers. For example, suppose Comcast decided to offer a streaming music service of their own, and decided to zero rate it. There are a couple ways they could do this. Before listing them, though, a brief overview of how cable internet works. The cable that comes into your house has something like 2 GHz of bandwidth. Comcast divides this into about 300 separate channels with 6 MHz of bandwidth each. In the old days, these low level 6 MHz channels carried analog TV signals, but nowadays they carry digital streams. Each of these digital streams is divided into several sub-streams all multiplexed onto the low level 6 MHz stream. They build all their services on top of those streams and sub-streams. Internet service is provided by combining several streams (enough to support your download speed) and running IP on top of that, with another low level stream used for upload. The key point here is that Comcast has a bunch of data steams into and out of your house that are running a lower level protocol than IP. So how could Comcast offer a streaming music service, designed to be playable on any device that you put on your home Comcast network? 1. They could simply run it on the web, and users access it over the internet. 2. They could run it at a lower level, running it on a sub-channel of one of their low level 6 MHz channels, with an app on their set-top boxes to interface to it. The app could make the music and control interface available on the LAN (wired and/or wifi) via a simple web server running on the set-top box. Note that with #2, there is no internet involved. The music starts on Comcast's internal network, and is transported to your LAN over a layer that is lower level than IP, where it is served on the LAN. But note that from a user point of view, these two are pretty much the same. In both cases to play Comcast streaming music on your home devices you go to a website which streams them to you. In #1 that website happens to be off your LAN, and in #2 it is on your LAN. It makes no sense to me to say that in case #1 Comcast cannot provide the service at no extra charge, but that in case #2 they can. I think net neutrality should be simple: • Your ISP must provide the speed and bandwidth promised, for the price promised. You can use up to the promised bandwidth, for anything you see fit and you will get the promised speed, without blocking or throttling, except if the ISP is legally required. That's pretty much it. Everything else should be covered by other more general regulations (antitrust, consumer protection).
syphilis2 9y ago
It's very strange, why does Wikimedia believe its information should be accessed free of charge while other information should not? Why would any ISP believe the same thing? A megabyte is a megabyte, why dictate where it should come from? I see self interested answers. Everyone playing the game is a winner (Wiki gets users, ISPs gets visibility, users get wiki access), and everyone with a small website gets left behind.
tzs 9y ago
This needs a [2014] tag. This is important because what the article actually says is that Wikimedia supports zero rating Wikimedia content. The author of the article believes that any zero rating is against net neutrality. That is not universally agreed upon. In particular, the FCC in its 2015 Open Internet Order did not ban zero rating. This is important because the 2015 Open Internet Order is the current net neutrality law in the US, which the Republicans are trying very hard to repeal. That has been massively in the tech news, especially recently since the FCC has now scheduled a vote on their repeal plan. That means that anyone reading the headline but not reading the article is going to think that it is saying Wikimedia does not support the current net neutrality law. Maybe they do, maybe they don't...but you cannot infer anything about that from their support of some zero rating.
- hrasyid 9y ago
  in Wikipedia parlance, the article committed a WP:OR
- brutal_chaos 9y ago
  From the referenced Wikimedia blog post[0] Wikimedia states, "The Wikimedia Foundation believes that the principle of net neutrality is critical to the future of the open Internet." Perhaps the concept is an evolution of Net Neutrality with the allowance of free distribution of necessities (knowledge in the case of Wikimedia), emergency services, &c. [0] https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/08/01/wikipedia-zero-and-net-neutrality-protecting-the-internet/ https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/08/01/wikipedia-zero-and-net...
matt123456 9y ago
This is a great argument against NN. Why shouldn't Wikipedia be allowed to give itself away for free? Why shouldn't users benefit from the magnanimity of developing telcos? Yes, Wikipedia Zero may be, as the article states, a band aid on the bullet wound of socioeconomic inequality- but if the alternative is to allow the wound to bleed unabated, is this not the lesser of two evils?
- hristov 9y ago
  Wikipedia is allowed to and does in fact give itself away for free. Go to wikipedia.org and check it out. If your question is why shouldn't tellcos be allowed to give wikipedia away for free, then that is a more complex question that requires a more complex answer. But it is a question that is entirely unrelated to the present net neutrality debate as it is happening in the US. The present debate is about telco services for which people pay a lot of money for. It is not about connecting the previously unconnected poor but about limiting the connections for people that are already connected and expect to stay connected. Perhaps there should be an exception made to net neutrality for services for the poor that are free of charge. The same way food shelters do not have to comply with the same laws as restaurants. Fine by me, but this is beside the point and not germane to the main net neutrality discussion.
- murukesh_s 9y ago
  I disagree, once zero rated, there is probably no going back. And anyone in an advantageous position as wiki media would prefer zero rating to prevent any potential local competitor from arising. Even if they are a non-profit, they wouldn't want to lose the ground. There was an attempt by Facebook to introduce zero rating in India through a big telco, which failed due to the protests... and guess what? The telco launched high speed internet services free for an entire year(google Reliance Jio) and even after that its almost free(1$/month/30gb), without any limits whatsoever.. had there been zero rating, they would have simply not released the lower priced service..
- nileshtrivedi 9y ago
  On the surface, yes. Here Wikipedia is just a pawn in the game being played by Telcos to actually do away with NN. If telcos really are being "magnanimous", why not let users browser whatever they want to (bandwidth/usage caps are okay). Links are the essence of the Internet. Internet broken up in unclickable silos will have huge effects.
cooper12 9y ago
Wikimedia sees [0] zero rating as a temporary step to spread knowledge in impoverished areas until costs can come down in those regions. They otherwise [1] do support Net Neutrality: > We support net neutrality, and believe it is crucial for a healthy, free, and open Internet. They defend Wikipedia Zero by pointing out it's not a commercial program, > These principles are designed to balance the social impact of the program with Wikimedia’s other values ... > We believe that free access to public interest resources can be provided in a manner that keeps the playing field level and avoids net neutrality issues. The Internet has tremendous potential to bring education and services to people for free The point is that adhering to net neutrality in impoverished areas would not abide by their goal of bringing knowledge to all areas of the world, while they can support it in more well off areas since it's an important aspect of the internet. [0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/11/25/wikipedias-complicated-relationship-with-net-neutrality/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/11/25... [1]: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/08/01/wikipedia-zero-and-net-neutrality-protecting-the-internet/ https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/08/01/wikipedia-zero-and-net...
hristov 9y ago
This is a very misleading and inflammatory title. Furthermore, it is not the linked article's title. The title makes it seem like Wikimedia's official position is against net neutrality and that is not the case. Their official position is in support of net neutrality. If you want to make arguments that some of their actions do not jibe with their official position, go ahead but make the title reflect that.
toomanybeersies 9y ago
I'm not opposed to zero-rating. It's a different end of the net neutrality debate I guess. If we compare zero rating to traditional media, there's nothing stopping someone from giving out free books/magazines/dvds/whatever, and I don't think anyone here would be ideologically opposed to people giving out free print media. It's a very ideological and academic debate, not really grounded in reality. In New Zealand, we had (possibly still do have) 0.facebook.com, which was free to access on mobile devices over mobile data. The sky did not fall, people didn't become indoctrinated zombies. Now in New Zealand, you can also buy cheaper data plans, that only work for certain websites, it's about half price, and you can only use the data for Spotify, Snapchat, Facebook, and a couple of others. I don't really agree with this, and think that it's breaking NN, however, I don't know the specifics of how the deal works, does Spotify pay the mobile provider money for this? Or does the provider just do it as a form of load balancing? And even if you don't agree with this on an ideological level when it comes to things such as free wikipedia access, I would argue that pragmatically, it is still a good thing. Good and evil are not black and white, increased knowledge is a good thing, decreased net neutrality (if you define free wikipedia as this, which I would understand) is a bad thing. It's a dimensional axis though, the good can outweigh the bad.
- rgbrenner 9y ago
  So if I understand you correctly.. you have a plan that has access to certain websites (spotify, etc) that you pay $X/month for. That is violating NN, in your opinion. But if X is $0, then it's not violating NN. How does changing the price change the discrimination between websites? A zero-rated plan is still a plan.
peterburkimsher 9y ago
I have an offline copy of Wikipedia on my phone. It's only 10 GB. Storage is cheap. Instead of arguing to get free network access that support some companies rather than others, why not promote offline apps? Pay to get the latest updates (news, communications with friends). Store things that don't change often (contacts, music, maps) offline and locally.
- phil248 9y ago
  That's really common is some countries with limited or restricted internet access. There was also a company trying to deploy a series of satellites to provide persistent, free (but low bandwidth) access to a small cross-section of the internet, with a focus on education and information. I wish I could remember that company's name.
  - phil248 9y ago
    The company is called Outernet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outernet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outernet
  - peterburkimsher 9y ago
    Instead of satellites, why not keep a cache in the 3G base station? Load times would be much faster, and the infrastructure is all there already. There might be some copyright issues for Google Maps tiles, but I wonder if the range is small enough to be within fair use.
phil248 9y ago
It's four years later, we should have some new information. If someone wrote a follow-up article on this topic I could see that being a worthy news item.
wyldfire 9y ago
We don't have to be arbitrary with our regulations. If we agree that zero rating makes sense for use cases like this one, maybe we create exceptions to net neutrality policy for the sake of zero-rating content offered by non-profit organizations. If that opens up a loophole for things like PACs and the like, then perhaps we create specific requirements there.

40 points by bifrost 9y ago

Prioritizing traffic based on ISP preference isn't necessarily a bad thing in all cases; it's just particularly dangerous when ISPs have a monopoly.

kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
> ... when ISPs have a monopoly. Or they collude to keep fees artificially high. Witness the disparity between American and European cellular plan rates. They all just happened to decide that we can't have sub-$30 plans despite "competition".
- johnhenry 9y ago
  Sorry, I wasn't clear. ISPs tend to have monopolies over specific areas orchestrated by an oligopoly that they have over the industry as a whole. Either way there isn't competition, and net-neutrality laws are necessary in this case for a free and open internet. Otherwise, if actual competition did exist, net-neutrality rules wouldn't matter so much.
- yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
  Yep. There's a reason that the laws are called antitrust laws.
- kuschku 9y ago
  This is especially striking when you compare Germany and Denmark, two countries bordering another, and a truly unlimited plan in DK is available at 16€/month, and in Germany at 190€/month
- dboreham 9y ago
  >Witness the disparity between American and European cellular plan rates. I spend a fair bit of time in Europe and since I'm Scottish by birth I devote an unreasonable amount of time trying to find the cheapest decent cell service. Something about this didn't jive so I did a quick check: Picking France as an example European country, Orange will sell you a 2G/Unlimited voice/SMS plan[1] for 25 Euro/mo. Meanwhile Verizon will charge you $35/mo for a similar 2G/unlimited voice plan[2]. Current $/Euro exchange rage is 1.2 so the French service ($30) is a little cheaper but not significantly. Also in my experience service in Europe is generally less good in terms of coverage and QoS than we experience in the US. YMMV of course. [1] https://boutique.orange.fr/mobile/forfaits-orange https://boutique.orange.fr/mobile/forfaits-orange [2] https://www.verizonwireless.com/plans/verizon-plan/ https://www.verizonwireless.com/plans/verizon-plan/

rgbrenner 9y ago

reading wikipedia blog post: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/08/01/wikipedia-zero-and-net-neutrality-protecting-the-internet/ https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/08/01/wikipedia-zero-and-net... "We believe that free access to public interest resources can be provided in a manner that keeps the playing field level and avoids net neutrality issues." The program is partnering with carriers to give away access to Wikipedia (although no money is exchanged between the carrier and Wikipedia). It doesn't sound like it avoids NN issues. Giving away access to a certain website.. sounds exactly like an NN issue. And I don't think Wikipedia's competitors would think this "keeps the playing field level" either. How would they compete against Wikipedia, when their users have to pay to access their service, but dont have to pay to access wikipedia? Wasn't this the same issue we had with Facebook's Zero program in India?

tzs 9y ago
> The program is partnering with carriers to give away access to Wikipedia (although no money is exchanged between the carrier and Wikipedia). It doesn't sound like it avoids NN issues. Giving away access to a certain website.. sounds exactly like an NN issue. > And I don't think Wikipedia's competitors would think this "keeps the playing field level" either. How would they compete against Wikipedia, when their users have to pay to access their service, but dont have to pay to access wikipedia? I disagree for two reasons: • First, as a matter of general principle I prefer to minimize overlap of different regulatory frameworks. We have a general framework for dealing with anticompetitive actions and practices--antitrust law. If for some reason antitrust law cannot deal with competition issues that zero rating Wikipedia cause, let's beef up antitrust law to deal with it. Same goes for some other areas that are often included in net neutrality, such as privacy and transparency. I don't want a separate law for these things for each kind of business. They are general things that should be independent of type of business. (I'm open to arguments that it is politically impossible to get a good general privacy law, for instance, passed and so we may have to settle for doing these things on a type of business by type of businesses basis in things like net neutrality regulations). • Second, most of what an ISP could accomplish with zero rating could be accomplished by other means that would be less efficient but not use the internet (and so completely avoid any possibility of net neutrality issues), but would have largely the same impact on consumers. For example, suppose Comcast decided to offer a streaming music service of their own, and decided to zero rate it. There are a couple ways they could do this. Before listing them, though, a brief overview of how cable internet works. The cable that comes into your house has something like 2 GHz of bandwidth. Comcast divides this into about 300 separate channels with 6 MHz of bandwidth each. In the old days, these low level 6 MHz channels carried analog TV signals, but nowadays they carry digital streams. Each of these digital streams is divided into several sub-streams all multiplexed onto the low level 6 MHz stream. They build all their services on top of those streams and sub-streams. Internet service is provided by combining several streams (enough to support your download speed) and running IP on top of that, with another low level stream used for upload. The key point here is that Comcast has a bunch of data steams into and out of your house that are running a lower level protocol than IP. So how could Comcast offer a streaming music service, designed to be playable on any device that you put on your home Comcast network? 1. They could simply run it on the web, and users access it over the internet. 2. They could run it at a lower level, running it on a sub-channel of one of their low level 6 MHz channels, with an app on their set-top boxes to interface to it. The app could make the music and control interface available on the LAN (wired and/or wifi) via a simple web server running on the set-top box. Note that with #2, there is no internet involved. The music starts on Comcast's internal network, and is transported to your LAN over a layer that is lower level than IP, where it is served on the LAN. But note that from a user point of view, these two are pretty much the same. In both cases to play Comcast streaming music on your home devices you go to a website which streams them to you. In #1 that website happens to be off your LAN, and in #2 it is on your LAN. It makes no sense to me to say that in case #1 Comcast cannot provide the service at no extra charge, but that in case #2 they can. I think net neutrality should be simple: • Your ISP must provide the speed and bandwidth promised, for the price promised. You can use up to the promised bandwidth, for anything you see fit and you will get the promised speed, without blocking or throttling, except if the ISP is legally required. That's pretty much it. Everything else should be covered by other more general regulations (antitrust, consumer protection).

syphilis2 9y ago

It's very strange, why does Wikimedia believe its information should be accessed free of charge while other information should not? Why would any ISP believe the same thing? A megabyte is a megabyte, why dictate where it should come from? I see self interested answers. Everyone playing the game is a winner (Wiki gets users, ISPs gets visibility, users get wiki access), and everyone with a small website gets left behind.

tzs 9y ago

This needs a [2014] tag. This is important because what the article actually says is that Wikimedia supports zero rating Wikimedia content. The author of the article believes that any zero rating is against net neutrality. That is not universally agreed upon. In particular, the FCC in its 2015 Open Internet Order did not ban zero rating. This is important because the 2015 Open Internet Order is the current net neutrality law in the US, which the Republicans are trying very hard to repeal. That has been massively in the tech news, especially recently since the FCC has now scheduled a vote on their repeal plan. That means that anyone reading the headline but not reading the article is going to think that it is saying Wikimedia does not support the current net neutrality law. Maybe they do, maybe they don't...but you cannot infer anything about that from their support of some zero rating.

hrasyid 9y ago
in Wikipedia parlance, the article committed a WP:OR
brutal_chaos 9y ago
From the referenced Wikimedia blog post[0] Wikimedia states, "The Wikimedia Foundation believes that the principle of net neutrality is critical to the future of the open Internet." Perhaps the concept is an evolution of Net Neutrality with the allowance of free distribution of necessities (knowledge in the case of Wikimedia), emergency services, &c. [0] https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/08/01/wikipedia-zero-and-net-neutrality-protecting-the-internet/ https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/08/01/wikipedia-zero-and-net...

matt123456 9y ago

This is a great argument against NN. Why shouldn't Wikipedia be allowed to give itself away for free? Why shouldn't users benefit from the magnanimity of developing telcos? Yes, Wikipedia Zero may be, as the article states, a band aid on the bullet wound of socioeconomic inequality- but if the alternative is to allow the wound to bleed unabated, is this not the lesser of two evils?

hristov 9y ago
Wikipedia is allowed to and does in fact give itself away for free. Go to wikipedia.org and check it out. If your question is why shouldn't tellcos be allowed to give wikipedia away for free, then that is a more complex question that requires a more complex answer. But it is a question that is entirely unrelated to the present net neutrality debate as it is happening in the US. The present debate is about telco services for which people pay a lot of money for. It is not about connecting the previously unconnected poor but about limiting the connections for people that are already connected and expect to stay connected. Perhaps there should be an exception made to net neutrality for services for the poor that are free of charge. The same way food shelters do not have to comply with the same laws as restaurants. Fine by me, but this is beside the point and not germane to the main net neutrality discussion.
murukesh_s 9y ago
I disagree, once zero rated, there is probably no going back. And anyone in an advantageous position as wiki media would prefer zero rating to prevent any potential local competitor from arising. Even if they are a non-profit, they wouldn't want to lose the ground. There was an attempt by Facebook to introduce zero rating in India through a big telco, which failed due to the protests... and guess what? The telco launched high speed internet services free for an entire year(google Reliance Jio) and even after that its almost free(1$/month/30gb), without any limits whatsoever.. had there been zero rating, they would have simply not released the lower priced service..
nileshtrivedi 9y ago
On the surface, yes. Here Wikipedia is just a pawn in the game being played by Telcos to actually do away with NN. If telcos really are being "magnanimous", why not let users browser whatever they want to (bandwidth/usage caps are okay). Links are the essence of the Internet. Internet broken up in unclickable silos will have huge effects.

cooper12 9y ago

Wikimedia sees [0] zero rating as a temporary step to spread knowledge in impoverished areas until costs can come down in those regions. They otherwise [1] do support Net Neutrality: > We support net neutrality, and believe it is crucial for a healthy, free, and open Internet. They defend Wikipedia Zero by pointing out it's not a commercial program, > These principles are designed to balance the social impact of the program with Wikimedia’s other values ... > We believe that free access to public interest resources can be provided in a manner that keeps the playing field level and avoids net neutrality issues. The Internet has tremendous potential to bring education and services to people for free The point is that adhering to net neutrality in impoverished areas would not abide by their goal of bringing knowledge to all areas of the world, while they can support it in more well off areas since it's an important aspect of the internet. [0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/11/25/wikipedias-complicated-relationship-with-net-neutrality/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/11/25... [1]: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/08/01/wikipedia-zero-and-net-neutrality-protecting-the-internet/ https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/08/01/wikipedia-zero-and-net...

hristov 9y ago

This is a very misleading and inflammatory title. Furthermore, it is not the linked article's title. The title makes it seem like Wikimedia's official position is against net neutrality and that is not the case. Their official position is in support of net neutrality. If you want to make arguments that some of their actions do not jibe with their official position, go ahead but make the title reflect that.

toomanybeersies 9y ago

I'm not opposed to zero-rating. It's a different end of the net neutrality debate I guess. If we compare zero rating to traditional media, there's nothing stopping someone from giving out free books/magazines/dvds/whatever, and I don't think anyone here would be ideologically opposed to people giving out free print media. It's a very ideological and academic debate, not really grounded in reality. In New Zealand, we had (possibly still do have) 0.facebook.com, which was free to access on mobile devices over mobile data. The sky did not fall, people didn't become indoctrinated zombies. Now in New Zealand, you can also buy cheaper data plans, that only work for certain websites, it's about half price, and you can only use the data for Spotify, Snapchat, Facebook, and a couple of others. I don't really agree with this, and think that it's breaking NN, however, I don't know the specifics of how the deal works, does Spotify pay the mobile provider money for this? Or does the provider just do it as a form of load balancing? And even if you don't agree with this on an ideological level when it comes to things such as free wikipedia access, I would argue that pragmatically, it is still a good thing. Good and evil are not black and white, increased knowledge is a good thing, decreased net neutrality (if you define free wikipedia as this, which I would understand) is a bad thing. It's a dimensional axis though, the good can outweigh the bad.

rgbrenner 9y ago
So if I understand you correctly.. you have a plan that has access to certain websites (spotify, etc) that you pay $X/month for. That is violating NN, in your opinion. But if X is $0, then it's not violating NN. How does changing the price change the discrimination between websites? A zero-rated plan is still a plan.

peterburkimsher 9y ago

I have an offline copy of Wikipedia on my phone. It's only 10 GB. Storage is cheap. Instead of arguing to get free network access that support some companies rather than others, why not promote offline apps? Pay to get the latest updates (news, communications with friends). Store things that don't change often (contacts, music, maps) offline and locally.

phil248 9y ago
That's really common is some countries with limited or restricted internet access. There was also a company trying to deploy a series of satellites to provide persistent, free (but low bandwidth) access to a small cross-section of the internet, with a focus on education and information. I wish I could remember that company's name.
- phil248 9y ago
  The company is called Outernet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outernet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outernet
- peterburkimsher 9y ago
  Instead of satellites, why not keep a cache in the 3G base station? Load times would be much faster, and the infrastructure is all there already. There might be some copyright issues for Google Maps tiles, but I wonder if the range is small enough to be within fair use.

phil248 9y ago

It's four years later, we should have some new information. If someone wrote a follow-up article on this topic I could see that being a worthy news item.

wyldfire 9y ago

We don't have to be arbitrary with our regulations. If we agree that zero rating makes sense for use cases like this one, maybe we create exceptions to net neutrality policy for the sake of zero-rating content offered by non-profit organizations. If that opens up a loophole for things like PACs and the like, then perhaps we create specific requirements there.