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The Wikipedia Zero program will end in 2018
- ukulele 9y agoWhat it is: > Wikipedia Zero was created in 2012 to address one barrier to participating in Wikipedia globally: high mobile data costs. Through the program, we partnered with mobile operators to waive mobile data fees for their customers to freely access Wikipedia on mobile devices.
- niftich 9y ago'Wikipedia Zero' is a zero-rating [1] scheme where many ISPs and network operators offered data access to certain Wikimedia sites (or just Wikipedia) at no metered-data cost to the line's subscriber. Zero-rating's relationship with the broader subject of net neutrality has been hotly debated, and some legislation considers it a violation of net neutrality, while others don't. Nonetheless, fierce backlash against Facebook's zero-rating scheme in India was contrasted with Wikipedia's zero-rating which was broadly popular, exposing a dilemma. By Wikimedia discontinuing this scheme, the situation moves towards resolution: no longer does it need to be debated whether Wikipedia's zero-rating is a net good, but Facebook's, although ostensibly also for public benefit, is something to be avoided. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-rating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-rating
- John_KZ 9y agoBesides India, Zero-rating has recently began being abused by mobile providers in the EU as a workaround to net neutrality laws. Apparently the 2015 law left a gray area and many mobile data plans now include a number of zero-rated websites.
- dingaling 9y ago> Facebook's, although ostensibly also for public benefit, is something to be avoided. Without descending into hyperbloics: why? If people want to use Facebook then why shouldn't they have the choice of doing so without additional cost? Many mobile providers zero-rate music streaming such as Spotify. Is that bad too?
- BoorishBears 9y agoTo blanket proponents of Net Neutrality, yes. The logic being, if you want to start a Spotify competitor, you’re now competing with a solution that has free data baked in. Even if your service is good, Spotify will be much cheaper. My position is a bit more nuanced than that but I’m weary of being blanket downvoted and derided for not just accepting net neutrality as our lord and savior so I’ll stop here...
- andybak 9y agoI'm in the mood for some heresy after seeing the WSJ/Peter Thiel article killed just now. Please go on.
- BoorishBears 9y agoOur comments are already all but removed from the conversation... But it's nothing new, my views are just centered around focusing on competition. I don't agree that bits are "just bits" anymore. If we all used internet to read HTML-only websites I'm sure ISPs could guarantee faster speeds and actually keep the guarantees for much less than they do now. Realistically it takes more infrastructure to provide certain types of content at scale and I respect the ISPs rights to reflect that in their pricing. People don't seem to get how Zero rating can benefits consumers without increasing the price of other data. They assume "If Spotify is free, they must be baking the cost into non-Spotify data". Which is not true. People just won't use data if most of their uses of data immediately blow up their data usage (remember back when Internet on phones was measured in KB? Some phones started coming out with J2ME apps for streaming video, but who would be foolhardy enough to use them when you were being charged several cents a minute?). Zero rating lets ISPs allow usages that would otherwise turn people away from data completely, while still charging from uses that are incidental. You'll be more likely to use your phone's data if you also have it on while in the car to stream music, the sum for the ISP is less money per MB on average, but more MBs in total. And of course we all act like not having blanket net neutrality laws prevents the FCC from acting in outlying cases. I'm all for targeted FCC intervention, we've seen it work in the past, I don't know why it'd stop working. The campaign for net neutrality has also become centered on half-truths and complete embellishments that take advantage of the average person's lack of technical knowledge which doesn't sit well with me. Technically I guess that's neither here nor there, but us "techies" only get the soapbox every once in a while, if we waste it on claiming false doomsdays like "You'll have to pay to watch porns and read Reddit!!!!!" and it doesn't come to fruition, next time something serious comes up the response will be "well last time nothing really happened did it?".
- cornholio 9y agoThe Wikipedia trafic (mostly text and thumbnail images) is also becoming quickly negligible compared to, say, Facebook with autoplaying videos, Youtube or other streaming providers. They hint that the global penetration of Wikipedia in the rest of the world is less one of connectivity and more one of local politics and interest in permitting and encouraging such an open tool.
- katastic 9y agoIt cost mere 2 million (of their huge budget) to serve ALL of the pages from Wikimedia Foundation for 2017. It can't cost "that much" for someone to download Wikipedia pages. And if so, you can still buy a Wikipedia snapshot CD/DVD. - But if Wikipedia is "too much" bandwidth (1) then what CAN you access on the internet? Why would you expect any utility from the internet at all, if a mostly text page is too much? - Unlike Wikipedia taking on the world itself, Wikipedia should be LOBBYING people with even more money to do it for them. You know... building internet infrastructures. Think how bad our internet would be today if in 2005 they said, "Let's work on minimizing the bandwidth usage instead of complaining that our ISPs need to get faster." It's like someone who wants to get out of poverty by spending less. Yeah, that's great. But you want an easier way to get out of poverty? Make more money. Trust me, I know. We should be elevating internet quality (and incomes) around the world, not minimizing usage for one of the already tiniest bandwidth websites on the planet. (1) BTW, there's also bandwidth reducing plugins for Chrome that have a 3rd-party convert them to black-and-white/low-res. [edit] There's even an official Google plugin! (If you're okay having them basically store the contents every site you visit...) https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/data-saver/pfmgfdlgomnbgkofeojodiodmgpgmkac?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/data-saver/pfmgfdl... I don't recall the 3rd party one I used but it definitely worked when I tested it out. It might be this one, Bandwidth Hero: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bandwidth-hero-live-image/mmhippoadkhcflebgghophicgldbahdb?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bandwidth-hero-liv... (Basically search "Bandwidth saver" in extensions.)
- mixmastamyk 9y agokatastic, I see many of your comments are dead, and they don't look like low quality as far as I can tell. Best guess is that the are a bit unkind to popular tech companies. Might wanna mail hn support?
- edent 9y agoOne thing not mentioned in the article, is the problems with piracy - https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/nz7eyg/wikipedia-zero-facebook-free-basics-angola-pirates-zero-rating https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/nz7eyg/wikipedia-... If you give people an artificially restricted free resource, they'll find a way to break out. If only there were a popular aphorism to explain this...
- userbinator 9y agoIf you give people an artificially restricted free resource, they'll find a way to break out. This fits with the observation that some of the most creative people I know are from Eastern Europe and former-Soviet countries. Restricting what people can do tends to, to put it bluntly, force them to think more. The darker side of this is that companies try very hard to make users think that they aren't restricted, just to stop them from "thinking too much" and thus getting out of the company's control. A 20-year-old developer in Paraguay found a vulnerability in Facebook Messenger that allowed people to use Free Basics to tunnel through to the "real" internet I predicted that would happen; but is that really a vulnerability or just the intrinsic way communication works? It's the digital analogy of asking someone to go to the library and read pages from a book to you, because you don't have access.
- srtjstjsj 9y agoVulnerability simply means communication that is unwanted by someone.
- toomanybeersies 9y agoIt's basically Tragedy of the Commons isn't it?
- dredmorbius 9y agoWhat is the aphorism you (seem to) have in mind?
- thisacctforreal 9y agoI think this is a good decision, unfortunately.
- vgf 9y agoI was involved in one of the non-FB companies who pushed for this weirdo program. If I were to guess the stats: I would guess FB got 99% of the traffic, even though wikipedia was the key thing of the marketing message, at least in the west. The basic FB setup was to target key people in african and south-east asian operators and after a while of the usual kind of negotiation say: if you'll set us up with this zero-rating program in your company, we'll get you a cushy FB job + visa to the US. It was an open joke in the business at the time. People in every part of the industry (including myself!) were scrambling to get an FB job offer. These were the kind of things we were discussing after drinks when meeting with mobile operator customers. It got to the point where operators were restricting the people who were allowed to meet with FB. I am not joking. I witnessed (on FB!) several people from these mobile operators who I had previously worked with later move to California for FB jobs. Yes, I am aware that this is likely illegal under US law. No, I don't have proof.
- rckclmbr 9y agoYea, I'm going to have to call this one out as bullshit, unless you can provide solid proof.
- vgf 9y agoAs I wrote, I don't have any solid proof for why they hired those people. I suppose the counter-case is that the FB partner program people could just have been very impressed with their negotiation counterparts? I am merely pointing out a direction for investigation here.
- hokumguru 9y agoNo one else is saying this but wouldn't this essentially have been against the law under net neutrality?
- dna_polymerase 9y agoYes it is. And the top comment perfectly sums up the hypocrisy from people rooting for Wikipedia Zero while slamming Facebboks free offer.
- r3bl 9y agoNet neutrality is not a law. Net neutrality is a principle implemented through different laws in different countries. As such, this practice would depend on how the concept of net neutrality is implemented into local laws.
- TheSmiddy 9y agoYes, however other countries don't have as strict net neutrality laws as the US once did. For example in Australia back when a 40GB monthly quota was the highest you could reasonably get data within most of Australia (actually a group of ISPs) was free and the quota only applied to international/outside bandwidth.
- kragen 9y agoWhile it's heartening to see the Wikimedia Foundation abandon its opposition to net neutrality, it would be more heartening if this was accompanied by explicit stance of support for net neutrality. Wikipedia, by contrast with the WMF, has always had strong support for net neutrality. WMF's opposition to net neutrality was a strong indicator of its lack of accountability to the community it ostensibly serves.
- cooper12 9y agoWikimedia has always been in favor of net neutrality, it's just that their role in the issue was always muddled by zero rating. From 2014: > The Wikimedia Foundation believes that the principle of net neutrality is critical to the future of the open Internet. (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...) In that article they also discuss how they reconcile net neutrality with Wikimedia Zero. From December 2017: > Net neutrality is essential for access to knowledge (https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/12/04/net-neutrality-access-to-knowledge/ https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/12/04/net-neutrality-access-...) Regarding Wikipedia strongly supporting net neutrality, I'm not sure I would agree considering it didn't participate in the day of action on December 12. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_of_Action_to_Save_Net_Neutrality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_of_Action_to_Save_Net_Neut...)
- kragen 9y agoZero rating violates net neutrality; you can't be in favor of zero-rating and opposed to net neutrality. I know there are people who disagree with that, or who think it's possible to "balance" zero-rating against net neutrality, including Erik Moeller of the WMF. Those people are entitled to their opinion, but it is wrong. I think English Wikipedia didn't participate in the Day of Action because it's harder and harder to organize anything on WP, which of course is why WMF exists and why it isn't accountable to WP.
- cooper12 9y agoYou said there wasn't any statement of support for NN from Wikimedia, I showed you otherwise. I also acknowledged that zero rating muddled the issue, but that's irrelevant now. So I don't see your point. The onus is now on you to prove they somehow don't support net neutrality. Regarding Wikimedia organizing things, the SOPA blackout [0] was actually organized by the community, Wikimedia only provided technical support on their end and wouldn't have done it unless there was community consensus. It's fine if you don't like Wikimedia, but there's no need to spout ignorance and double down while you do it. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOPA_initiative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOPA_initiative
- TheSmiddy 9y agoOn the consumption side of wikipedia there are other options for getting it into bandwidth poor areas. for example there is endless OS (https://endlessos.com/ https://endlessos.com/) which is essentially an offline linux distro aimed at school kids preloaded with a snapshot of wikipedia, khan academy, etc.