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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 develo

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.
soneil 9y ago
It is a difficult question. One example that always springs to mind, was Australian friends online in the early 2000's who told me their ISP had linux mirrors - which was of great value to them, because they were charged less (if at all) for data within their ISP's networks. They were also much faster, since it meant the data wasn't trans-oceanic. Later Steam came up as another example of the same idea. They thought this was fantastic. It solved a lot of problems (and expense, and speed) for them. But it's not particularly 'neutral' either, is it? Given the choice between a distro that's on my ISP's mirror, and a distro where I have to slug data from the other side of the planet, I'm going to make a choice based on my ISP's preferences. Putting a wikipedia cache/mirror within the ISP's network would, in this example, render pretty much the same results as "wikipedia zero". Same benefits, same concerns. I'm not really arguing this one way or the other. Just that it does muddy the water when we have examples that benefit the enduser, to counter the scarier examples we see elsewhere.

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.

soneil 9y ago

It is a difficult question. One example that always springs to mind, was Australian friends online in the early 2000's who told me their ISP had linux mirrors - which was of great value to them, because they were charged less (if at all) for data within their ISP's networks. They were also much faster, since it meant the data wasn't trans-oceanic. Later Steam came up as another example of the same idea. They thought this was fantastic. It solved a lot of problems (and expense, and speed) for them. But it's not particularly 'neutral' either, is it? Given the choice between a distro that's on my ISP's mirror, and a distro where I have to slug data from the other side of the planet, I'm going to make a choice based on my ISP's preferences. Putting a wikipedia cache/mirror within the ISP's network would, in this example, render pretty much the same results as "wikipedia zero". Same benefits, same concerns. I'm not really arguing this one way or the other. Just that it does muddy the water when we have examples that benefit the enduser, to counter the scarier examples we see elsewhere.