18 ms·

Wikipedia’s ‘complicated’ relationship with net neutrality

108 points by davmre 12y ago

snowwrestler 12y ago
Wikipedians take it on faith that their website is better, more useful, more ethical, more informative, etc., than other websites. Thus they are able to believe that it is right that their website should receive special (non-neutral) treatment from ISPs. The problem is, most website operators feel this way. I'm sure Google's executives believe that everyone would be better off if they had more access to Google; and Facebook folks think that about Facebook; Apple folks about iCloud; etc. So, this is not actually a consistent framework for how ISPs should treat traffic. What if some team develops a better source of information than Wikipedia? They'll be hamstrung from the beginning because Wikipedia is "free" and they are not. It takes the decision-making out of the hands of the consumer, and puts it into the hands of big ISPs and websites. Whether the website is run by a non-profit or not doesn't matter much...either way it is like the foxes guarding the hen house.
- GabrielF00 12y ago
  > Wikipedians take it on faith that their website is better, more useful, more ethical, more informative, etc., than other websites. I've been a Wikipedia editor for about 10 years. I don't think that your perception of the community has any basis in reality. Lot's of Wikimedians are pretty vocal about their disagreements with the Wikimedia Foundation on a wide range of issues (including this one). There are lots of discussions within the community about the limitations of Wikipedia's model.
  - woah 12y ago
    How do you feel about non-neutral treatment of Wikipedia traffic? Does this differ from your feelings on non-neutral treatment of Netflix traffic?
    - GabrielF00 12y ago
      In the US or in Sub-Saharan Africa? I tend to agree with the WMF that in parts of the world where millions of people are using a smartphone as their first computer, providing free information is key to wikimedia's mission. I think that the world would be better off if all websites were treated equally by all ISPs, but I also think the world would be better off if millions of people who have never had a computer before can have the access to information that we take for granted. Given that the WMF is unlikely to be able to change telecom policy or business practices in all these countries, I think it's better to work within the existing system and provide a resource that would otherwise be costly (perhaps prohibitively so). Having said that, many Wikimedians disagree with me.
      - solipsism 12y ago
        But you didn't answer the question, did you? but I also think the world would be better off if millions of people who have never had a computer before can have the access to information that we take for granted Like Netflix? Or only like Wikipedia? That's the question. Are you saying it's more important for Sub-Saharan Africans to get access to Wikipedia than Netflix? Netflix might disagree. scholarpedia.org might have something to say about it as well. So might stackexchange.com.
        GabrielF00 12y ago
        I think I did answer the question. I don't think that users should be billed for Internet access based on what they use, and I don't think that carriers should be able to play favorites when it comes to content providers. However, given that the wireless industry in many third-world countries works this way, and given that the WMF is unlikely to change either business practices or telecom policy in these countries, I would much rather see the WMF work within the system and try to provide free resources to people then refuse to participate on principle. There's a huge practical benefit to Wikimedia Zero - people who have very limited access to information resources can get these great resources for free. Balanced against that, I just don't see how not participating benefits anybody, except, perhaps, by letting some people in San Francisco and Cambridge, MA feel good about standing up for an abstract principle.
- sparkzilla 12y ago
  As someone making a Wikipedia competitor I could not agree more.
mrbabbage 12y ago
This is super interesting! Thanks for sharing. I believe this is a good illustration of how most net neutrality advocacy is misguided. The (very real) problem net neutrality advocates are trying to solve isn't paid prioritization; rather, it's a lack of meaningful competition in the "last-mile" broadband market, and this market failure produces aberrant scenarios like NBC Comcast shaking down its competitors (eg Netflix). I'm hesitant to strongly support most mainstream net neutrality proposals because of situations like this, where network discrimination is net positive. Anyway, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts.
- ianlevesque 12y ago
  You're absolutely right. However, the probability that meaningful competition will break through the enormous barriers to entry that Comcast, et al have erected before they manage to irreparably damage one of the few remaining growth industries in the US (tech) is near zero.
  - icebraining 12y ago
    Sorry to pick on you, but the responses of net neutrality advocates vis-à-vis competition sound like the standard strategy of the Foreign Office when dealing with crisis from Yes, Prime Minister. "maybe we should do something about it, but there's nothing we can do", it's a natural monopoly. "maybe there was something we could have done, but it's too late now", they already have a stronghold. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0751831/quotes?item=qt0190692 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0751831/quotes?item=qt0190692
    - ianlevesque 12y ago
      Don't get me wrong, I'd vastly prefer competition. There just isn't much reason to be optimistic it will arrive. I do have a horse in this race, my employer just struck a very non-neutral deal with a wireless carrier: http://newsroom.t-mobile.com/news/more-music-freedom.htm http://newsroom.t-mobile.com/news/more-music-freedom.htm
    - wpietri 12y ago
pasta_2 12y ago
Net Neutrality is really a fight between two industries about shifting their costs onto one another, with really good PR from the tech industry that has enlisted normal people onto their side. T-Mobile's zero-rating of data from certain music services supposedly violates "net neutrality", but customers like it and it allows them to compete with ATT and Verizon. It may be unfair to some other music service start up, but who cares? It's unfair in the same way that an incumbent has more resources to advertise their product than a start up.
- hga 12y ago
  There are generally 4 economic players at minimum: Network service like Netflix. Their ISP, like L3. Consumer's ISP, like Comcast (also a Netflix competitor). Consumer. The end points are paying money to the ISPs in the middle.
  - mlinksva 12y ago
    There's also content providers, content owners, or other ugly term. They aren't participating in network traffic, but deeply shape structure and demands of at least network services and consumers above, consumer ISP in some cases.
philipn 12y ago
This is an interesting topic, but kind of a weird article. Wikipedia wrote a long article addressing the topic of Net Neutrality and Wikipedia Zero a few months back. This is worth reading if you're interested in the topic: 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... Kind of odd that the Washington Post doesn't mention any of these points. Personally, I still feel the Wikipedia Zero program violates net neutrality, but mentioning Wikipedia's self-imposed constraints here seems important.
- guelo 12y ago
  Good point. Here are the constraints: > No exchange of payment. The Wikimedia Foundation does not pay carriers to zero-rate access to the Wikimedia sites and does not receive payments from carriers through Wikipedia Zero. > Wikipedia Zero cannot be sold as part of a bundle. Access to the Wikimedia sites through Wikipedia Zero cannot be sold through limited service bundles. > No exclusive rights. We try to partner with as many carriers as possible to maximize the number of users that can benefit from the initiative. > Open to collaborating with other public interest sites. Our main goal is to promote free access to knowledge and we want to help other similar services interested in doing the same.
srinivasan 12y ago
The authors didn't address the point that all the current use cases for zero rating are on wireless, not on traditional broadband. The Google-Verizon proposal from 2010 had this "wireless exclusion". I was opposed to it in principle, but now as a T-mobile customer I really love the fact that Spotify doesn't count to my usage limits. I can completely see how zero rating could benefit the developing world and even the elderly in developed countries - these demographics are very likely to own a cellphone even though they might not use home broadband. I don't see anything wrong in providing a throttled experience for free as long as all paid traffic (including non-zero rated versions of Wikipedia that include pictures/video) is treated equally.
- r00fus 12y ago
  Wondering why you don't see an issue with zero-rating - it's essentially making an unlevel playing field, with the big players like Facebook/Spotify buying an anticompetitive moat against any new entrants. I don't see how zero-rating is going to help network congestion either - won't zero-rated Spotify for my neighbors causes my calls to drop or my maps to not update? Is zero-rating some bandwidth somehow magically evading Shannon's Law?
  - srinivasan 12y ago
    You brought up three issues: (i) Anti-competitiveness in music streaming (ii) Anti-competitiveness in social networks (in developing regions) (iii) Effect of zero-rated services on congestion (i) http://www.t-mobile.com/offer/music-freedom-list.html http://www.t-mobile.com/offer/music-freedom-list.html This is a large enough list that I wouldn't worry about anti-competitiveness. It is still them vs. everyone else, but looking at the list right now, the barriers to entry cannot be that high, which means any anti-competitive effect cannot be that high either. I and most others in my income category (college undergrads) are willing to accept this in order to have free music streaming. (ii) Facebook (in some parts of the developing world) is a slightly different issue, and not necessarily one that I agree with. Still, zero rating popular websites in the developing world seems to be win-win-win for consumers, carriers, and content providers, and ignoring market forces is simply not a solution. Especially if the target demographic simply cannot afford to pay for data - this is an entirely different market and I don't have the experience to form an opinion on this. Edited my original post to remove Facebook. (iii) Let's assume all paid traffic should be treated equally. And to keep things fair to paying customers, paid traffic should be prioritized over free traffic. I'm willing to bet this already happens indirectly - by lowering the music quality when the network is congested. But what if I have Spotify Premium - I (indirectly) pay for my traffic, so why should your maps app be any more important? --- Obviously there are tough questions here, and a "one size fits all" net neutrality approach for wireless and broadband might not be the best solution. If wireless was as cheap and fast as broadband, I would be all for net neutrality on wireless. But it's not. They are different 'products' in economic terms (even if they have a similar end result and "feel the same"), and I think it's therefore okay for policies that govern them to be different.
daveloyall 12y ago
There was no concept of 'zero-rating' before telecoms/ISPs established the concept of a 'rate-per-byte'.
- mnx 12y ago
  well, early residential connections were paid per minute, so I don't see how that was any better. There's nothing wrong with rate-per-byte, because some of the costs actually are per-byte.
  - daveloyall 12y ago
    From memory: * Dial-up in the 28.8k era was per-minute. Occasional $700 AOL bill. Mom was pissed. * Dial-up in the 33.6k through 56k eras was flat-rate. Start a download before bed, enjoy it in the morning. * Broadband, pre 3mbps era. Flat rate. * Netzero: Back to dialup, but now free. (Especially if you replaced their dialer software with a pencil-and-paper key to the Caesar cipher they used for auth.) * Cellular. Sorta based on SMS rates. * Broadband, 10mbps. Some companies have caps. Only a subset of users notice them, nobody had their back. * Mobile. Smart phones! But the device is the limiting factor, not the network. * Broadband, every major provider has caps written into the contract, but few enable technical enforcement of the caps. I smell deception: "We've always had these caps, you must have increased your usage!" * Mobile, post 3g: pay per byte, period.
- chime 12y ago
  Precisely. I am trying to see the "complex" moral dilemma part of this issue that Wikipedia claims but I can't. For a fixed price, people should get a fixed speed - on wireless or broadband. That's it. Every byte of data should be treated the same. Disadvantaged consumers should not get free FB or Wiki. Instead they should get free 64kbps or 1mbps (or whatever the market can bear). "Zero rating" is harmful because content providers and telecoms get to decide what is worth providing for "free". It's never really free because in the end someone is paying for bandwidth. Voice calls, text, and IP are all just data. If I pay for 20/5mbps, give me that. If I have a fixed speed of 20mbps, I do not have "unlimited data" so there is no need to monitor and cap. It is 20mbps / 8 * 86400 seconds * 30 days = 6TB per month max. 64kbps is 20GB/month max. Nobody's browsing 24/7 at max. speed on mobile so there is very little chance a mobile user in free data plan of 64kbps is really going to use 20GB of data per month. Wikipedia should consistently support Net Neutrality throughout the world regardless of local deals. If they really want to help consumers in poor countries, fight for them to get a slow data plan that can be used not only for Wikipedia but also Khan Academy, MIT OpenCourseWare, or anything else the user wants to see.
guelo 12y ago
This is a bullshit stance by Wikipedia. If when Wikipedia started there had been some popular ad supported encyclopedia that received preferential ISP treatment Wikipedia would not exist today. Maybe it makes sense for the established internet companies to oppose net neutrality because they're the ones that would get packaged up by the ISPs. But it's bad for everyone else.
- pulgrot 12y ago
  Does the end result of more people having free access to the information wikipedia provides, justify the zero rating/preferential treatment by ISPs of the site?
  - sparkzilla 12y ago
    No, Because it closes out competition to newer, better information.
    - username223 12y ago
      Like Demand Media? Would it be a bad thing for people to have free access to Wikipedia and Open Street Maps? They could always pay for Demand and GMaps if they wanted to.
    - Golf_Hotel_Mike 12y ago
      >No, Because it closes out competition to newer, better information. But that would only make sense if Wikipedia created some sort of insurmountable barrier for newer, better information. It doesn't. Newer, better information can reach people through Wikipedia with just as much ease (provided it fits Wiki's publishing standards) as it would through any other platform. For all intents and purposes, Wikipedia and other similar open and free general knowledge sources can (and perhaps should) be regarded as a public good. We don't complain that the government's monopoly on building public roads closes out competition to 'newer, better roads'. We recognize that these roads are vital public infrastructure. Platforms like Wikipedia should be no different.
legohead 12y ago
This isn't a dilemma. You can have net neutrality and also have Wikipedia Zero -- it isn't mutually exclusive. It might make it a little harder and Wikipedia may need to ask for more donations, but this is their goal, not anyone else's. Wikipedia isn't the internet.
yzzxy 12y ago
Serious question, as I don't really have a strong opinion on zero rating either way: In a scenario where zero-rating is available to all actors at equivalent prices, is there still a problem? It would raise the barrier to entry for internet companies perhaps, but probably not by too much. I guess you could argue it encourages bandwidth capping? I'd like to hear arguments from both sides.
- guelo 12y ago
  Not mentioned in the article is that Wikipedia refuses to pay to participate in zero rating. In the world you envision only profitable commercial sites would be available.
- brianpan 12y ago
  Unless that price is zero, that's exactly what net neutrality is trying to avoid- an uneven playing field.
- cegev 12y ago
  >In a scenario where zero-rating is available to all actors at equivalent prices, is there still a problem? It would raise the barrier to entry for internet companies perhaps, but probably not by too much. I guess you could argue it encourages bandwidth capping? An alternative, would be to allow zero-rating through free prioritization. Give either web services or consumers the choice of "this is an important connection: per-byte-rate and give higher priority," or "this isn't so important: zero-rate and give lower priority." That way VoIP and other latency/rate-critical services could operate more reliably, while BitTorrent, home cloud storage and others could operate without congesting the network and without data cap problems. If this choice was allowed in an automated way, it would not seem to cause any unfairness, or keep smaller/newer players off the market.
kazinator 12y ago
Net non-neutrality used to overcome severe data caps so some poor buggers can browse the Wikipedia? This really sounds like trying to add one wrong to another to try to make a right. This really confuses issues too; metered access to a network isn't quite the same thing as non-neutral access where some content gets much better latency and bandwidth. Cutting off access to all sources of content at a given data cap does in fact meet the definition of neutral: No Netflix for you, and no Usenet, no Skype, no IRC, no git, no ssh, ... Data caps in fact hurt the high-bandwidth premium services that easily bust data caps, whose purveyors support non-neutrality.
belorn 12y ago
This seems very similar to the postal system when it give free-of-charge service for humanitarian aid. It seems a very strict interpretation of the common carrier principle to disallow it on the basis that its discriminating against those who has to pay. What is the threat model to net neutrality for cases when there is no exchange of payments?
_greim_ 12y ago
If your meritocracy is just a snapshot of whoever's best at a specific time, then you don't have a meritocracy. In other words, what happens when a new, better source of information comes online?
dragonwriter 12y ago
This is kind of at the peripheries of net neutrality. I don't recall any proposed "net neutrality" related regulations -- whether the 2010 Open Internet Order, the NPRM from earlier this year, or any of the concrete alternatives proposed -- that would have prohibited zero-rating on mobile networks that have data volume charges. This isn't even the same thing as paid prioritization (which the recent NPRM may still have allowed, within some bounds), where edge providers are given a choice to pay the ISP or have packets get lower delivery priority -- the ability of the customer to connect and the quality of service provided on the connection isn't affected by the payment, the customer gets exactly the service they would get connecting to an edge provider that hadn't made a deal with the access provider. The only difference is that the customer doesn't have to pay for the data consumption (which essentially is equivalent to the edge provider reimbursing the consumer for the data cost, except presumably the costs are lower commensurate with the simplicity of a direct edge provider to access provider payment route.) So, while certainly this kind of thing might raise concerns related to net neutrality, its not what the focus of the net neutrality debate and regulatory effort has been.
- chimeracoder 12y ago
  > So, while certainly this kind of thing might raise concerns related to net neutrality, its not what the focus of the net neutrality debate and regulatory effort has been. Well, that's because this wasn't a threat (in the US) until relatively recently, unlike paid prioritization and/or throttling. That doesn't mean that zero-rating doesn't violate the same principles as paid prioritization does. If you take a look at the doomsday scenario that Fred Wilson outlines in "VC Pitches In A Year Or Two"[0], the situation could just as easily apply to a zero-rated world. You can think of zero-rating as "slow lanes", the speed on the slow lane is set to zero. (In a way, zero-rating is actually worse than paid prioritization, because it achieves the same end result, but placing a more consumer-friendly facade on the same rotten interior.) > This is kind of at the peripheries of net neutrality. I don't recall any proposed "net neutrality" related regulations -- whether the 2010 Open Internet Order, the NPRM from earlier this year, or any of the concrete alternatives proposed -- that would have prohibited zero-rating on mobile networks that have data volume charges. I also don't recall any large-scale[1] efforts to impose zero-rating on mobile consumers until the last year or so, which is why net neutrality legislation hasn't focused on it. In general, legislation around consumer protections tends to be reactive rather than proactive, and net neutrality has definitely followed this pattern. [0] http://avc.com/2014/01/vc-pitches-in-a-year-or-two/ http://avc.com/2014/01/vc-pitches-in-a-year-or-two/ [1] (Yes, they existed in some cases, but they were very limited and relatively obscure.)
gioele 12y ago
For those who think Wikipedia is right in defending Wikipedia Zero, could you please elaborate on how this will not impact the adoption of any alternative encyclopaedic website?
- err4nt 12y ago
  Can you fork Wikipedia? I remember back in the day it was all open licensed and downloadable, but it's grown quite a bit since then.
dlitz 12y ago
Wikipedia Zero creates a financial penalty for users who want to preserve their privacy by using Wikipedia over Tor. I wonder what folks here think about the ethics of that.
pmontra 12y ago
A better solution: no data caps, even if it has to be enforced by regulations.
- rmc 12y ago
  But bandwidth is a limited medium. It is fair IMO that those who use it a lot should pay more,
  - pmontra 12y ago
    Which doesn't mean having a data cap. It could be 1$ per GB on wireless devices (where bandwidth is really limited because of collisions with everybody's else traffic) or whatever amount it makes sense. Wikipedia pages are quite skinny. Servers usually pay per GB with many VPS providers right now, with a monthly quota included in the base fee. If you have your own datacenter you pay per GB in other ways. That said, subsidising the access to one own website could be seen as a fair commercial practice or anticompetitive behavior. It depends on so many factors that I don't even want to get into it.
stefantalpalaru 12y ago
There's a better solution than zero rating on mobile plans: a very low bandwidth (4-8 KiB/s) unlimited connection once the full speed limit is reached. TIM does this in Italy and it doesn't care what sites you access in this low bandwidth regime.
- rakoo 12y ago
  The thing is that zero rating can be promoted by platforms such as Wikipedia and Facebook, who want to promote net neutrality; unlimited low speed connection is an ISP-only thing, and I haven't seen many big ISPs (really) promote net neutrality.

108 points by davmre 12y ago

Wikipedians take it on faith that their website is better, more useful, more ethical, more informative, etc., than other websites. Thus they are able to believe that it is right that their website should receive special (non-neutral) treatment from ISPs. The problem is, most website operators feel this way. I'm sure Google's executives believe that everyone would be better off if they had more access to Google; and Facebook folks think that about Facebook; Apple folks about iCloud; etc. So, this is not actually a consistent framework for how ISPs should treat traffic. What if some team develops a better source of information than Wikipedia? They'll be hamstrung from the beginning because Wikipedia is "free" and they are not. It takes the decision-making out of the hands of the consumer, and puts it into the hands of big ISPs and websites. Whether the website is run by a non-profit or not doesn't matter much...either way it is like the foxes guarding the hen house.

GabrielF00 12y ago
> Wikipedians take it on faith that their website is better, more useful, more ethical, more informative, etc., than other websites. I've been a Wikipedia editor for about 10 years. I don't think that your perception of the community has any basis in reality. Lot's of Wikimedians are pretty vocal about their disagreements with the Wikimedia Foundation on a wide range of issues (including this one). There are lots of discussions within the community about the limitations of Wikipedia's model.
- woah 12y ago
  How do you feel about non-neutral treatment of Wikipedia traffic? Does this differ from your feelings on non-neutral treatment of Netflix traffic?
  - GabrielF00 12y ago
    In the US or in Sub-Saharan Africa? I tend to agree with the WMF that in parts of the world where millions of people are using a smartphone as their first computer, providing free information is key to wikimedia's mission. I think that the world would be better off if all websites were treated equally by all ISPs, but I also think the world would be better off if millions of people who have never had a computer before can have the access to information that we take for granted. Given that the WMF is unlikely to be able to change telecom policy or business practices in all these countries, I think it's better to work within the existing system and provide a resource that would otherwise be costly (perhaps prohibitively so). Having said that, many Wikimedians disagree with me.
    - solipsism 12y ago
      But you didn't answer the question, did you? but I also think the world would be better off if millions of people who have never had a computer before can have the access to information that we take for granted Like Netflix? Or only like Wikipedia? That's the question. Are you saying it's more important for Sub-Saharan Africans to get access to Wikipedia than Netflix? Netflix might disagree. scholarpedia.org might have something to say about it as well. So might stackexchange.com.
      - GabrielF00 12y ago
        I think I did answer the question. I don't think that users should be billed for Internet access based on what they use, and I don't think that carriers should be able to play favorites when it comes to content providers. However, given that the wireless industry in many third-world countries works this way, and given that the WMF is unlikely to change either business practices or telecom policy in these countries, I would much rather see the WMF work within the system and try to provide free resources to people then refuse to participate on principle. There's a huge practical benefit to Wikimedia Zero - people who have very limited access to information resources can get these great resources for free. Balanced against that, I just don't see how not participating benefits anybody, except, perhaps, by letting some people in San Francisco and Cambridge, MA feel good about standing up for an abstract principle.
sparkzilla 12y ago
As someone making a Wikipedia competitor I could not agree more.

mrbabbage 12y ago

This is super interesting! Thanks for sharing. I believe this is a good illustration of how most net neutrality advocacy is misguided. The (very real) problem net neutrality advocates are trying to solve isn't paid prioritization; rather, it's a lack of meaningful competition in the "last-mile" broadband market, and this market failure produces aberrant scenarios like NBC Comcast shaking down its competitors (eg Netflix). I'm hesitant to strongly support most mainstream net neutrality proposals because of situations like this, where network discrimination is net positive. Anyway, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts.

ianlevesque 12y ago
You're absolutely right. However, the probability that meaningful competition will break through the enormous barriers to entry that Comcast, et al have erected before they manage to irreparably damage one of the few remaining growth industries in the US (tech) is near zero.
- icebraining 12y ago
  Sorry to pick on you, but the responses of net neutrality advocates vis-à-vis competition sound like the standard strategy of the Foreign Office when dealing with crisis from Yes, Prime Minister. "maybe we should do something about it, but there's nothing we can do", it's a natural monopoly. "maybe there was something we could have done, but it's too late now", they already have a stronghold. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0751831/quotes?item=qt0190692 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0751831/quotes?item=qt0190692
  - ianlevesque 12y ago
    Don't get me wrong, I'd vastly prefer competition. There just isn't much reason to be optimistic it will arrive. I do have a horse in this race, my employer just struck a very non-neutral deal with a wireless carrier: http://newsroom.t-mobile.com/news/more-music-freedom.htm http://newsroom.t-mobile.com/news/more-music-freedom.htm
  - wpietri 12y ago

pasta_2 12y ago

Net Neutrality is really a fight between two industries about shifting their costs onto one another, with really good PR from the tech industry that has enlisted normal people onto their side. T-Mobile's zero-rating of data from certain music services supposedly violates "net neutrality", but customers like it and it allows them to compete with ATT and Verizon. It may be unfair to some other music service start up, but who cares? It's unfair in the same way that an incumbent has more resources to advertise their product than a start up.

hga 12y ago
There are generally 4 economic players at minimum: Network service like Netflix. Their ISP, like L3. Consumer's ISP, like Comcast (also a Netflix competitor). Consumer. The end points are paying money to the ISPs in the middle.
- mlinksva 12y ago
  There's also content providers, content owners, or other ugly term. They aren't participating in network traffic, but deeply shape structure and demands of at least network services and consumers above, consumer ISP in some cases.

philipn 12y ago

This is an interesting topic, but kind of a weird article. Wikipedia wrote a long article addressing the topic of Net Neutrality and Wikipedia Zero a few months back. This is worth reading if you're interested in the topic: 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... Kind of odd that the Washington Post doesn't mention any of these points. Personally, I still feel the Wikipedia Zero program violates net neutrality, but mentioning Wikipedia's self-imposed constraints here seems important.

guelo 12y ago
Good point. Here are the constraints: > No exchange of payment. The Wikimedia Foundation does not pay carriers to zero-rate access to the Wikimedia sites and does not receive payments from carriers through Wikipedia Zero. > Wikipedia Zero cannot be sold as part of a bundle. Access to the Wikimedia sites through Wikipedia Zero cannot be sold through limited service bundles. > No exclusive rights. We try to partner with as many carriers as possible to maximize the number of users that can benefit from the initiative. > Open to collaborating with other public interest sites. Our main goal is to promote free access to knowledge and we want to help other similar services interested in doing the same.

srinivasan 12y ago

The authors didn't address the point that all the current use cases for zero rating are on wireless, not on traditional broadband. The Google-Verizon proposal from 2010 had this "wireless exclusion". I was opposed to it in principle, but now as a T-mobile customer I really love the fact that Spotify doesn't count to my usage limits. I can completely see how zero rating could benefit the developing world and even the elderly in developed countries - these demographics are very likely to own a cellphone even though they might not use home broadband. I don't see anything wrong in providing a throttled experience for free as long as all paid traffic (including non-zero rated versions of Wikipedia that include pictures/video) is treated equally.

r00fus 12y ago
Wondering why you don't see an issue with zero-rating - it's essentially making an unlevel playing field, with the big players like Facebook/Spotify buying an anticompetitive moat against any new entrants. I don't see how zero-rating is going to help network congestion either - won't zero-rated Spotify for my neighbors causes my calls to drop or my maps to not update? Is zero-rating some bandwidth somehow magically evading Shannon's Law?
- srinivasan 12y ago
  You brought up three issues: (i) Anti-competitiveness in music streaming (ii) Anti-competitiveness in social networks (in developing regions) (iii) Effect of zero-rated services on congestion (i) http://www.t-mobile.com/offer/music-freedom-list.html http://www.t-mobile.com/offer/music-freedom-list.html This is a large enough list that I wouldn't worry about anti-competitiveness. It is still them vs. everyone else, but looking at the list right now, the barriers to entry cannot be that high, which means any anti-competitive effect cannot be that high either. I and most others in my income category (college undergrads) are willing to accept this in order to have free music streaming. (ii) Facebook (in some parts of the developing world) is a slightly different issue, and not necessarily one that I agree with. Still, zero rating popular websites in the developing world seems to be win-win-win for consumers, carriers, and content providers, and ignoring market forces is simply not a solution. Especially if the target demographic simply cannot afford to pay for data - this is an entirely different market and I don't have the experience to form an opinion on this. Edited my original post to remove Facebook. (iii) Let's assume all paid traffic should be treated equally. And to keep things fair to paying customers, paid traffic should be prioritized over free traffic. I'm willing to bet this already happens indirectly - by lowering the music quality when the network is congested. But what if I have Spotify Premium - I (indirectly) pay for my traffic, so why should your maps app be any more important? --- Obviously there are tough questions here, and a "one size fits all" net neutrality approach for wireless and broadband might not be the best solution. If wireless was as cheap and fast as broadband, I would be all for net neutrality on wireless. But it's not. They are different 'products' in economic terms (even if they have a similar end result and "feel the same"), and I think it's therefore okay for policies that govern them to be different.

daveloyall 12y ago

There was no concept of 'zero-rating' before telecoms/ISPs established the concept of a 'rate-per-byte'.

mnx 12y ago
well, early residential connections were paid per minute, so I don't see how that was any better. There's nothing wrong with rate-per-byte, because some of the costs actually are per-byte.
- daveloyall 12y ago
  From memory: * Dial-up in the 28.8k era was per-minute. Occasional $700 AOL bill. Mom was pissed. * Dial-up in the 33.6k through 56k eras was flat-rate. Start a download before bed, enjoy it in the morning. * Broadband, pre 3mbps era. Flat rate. * Netzero: Back to dialup, but now free. (Especially if you replaced their dialer software with a pencil-and-paper key to the Caesar cipher they used for auth.) * Cellular. Sorta based on SMS rates. * Broadband, 10mbps. Some companies have caps. Only a subset of users notice them, nobody had their back. * Mobile. Smart phones! But the device is the limiting factor, not the network. * Broadband, every major provider has caps written into the contract, but few enable technical enforcement of the caps. I smell deception: "We've always had these caps, you must have increased your usage!" * Mobile, post 3g: pay per byte, period.
chime 12y ago
Precisely. I am trying to see the "complex" moral dilemma part of this issue that Wikipedia claims but I can't. For a fixed price, people should get a fixed speed - on wireless or broadband. That's it. Every byte of data should be treated the same. Disadvantaged consumers should not get free FB or Wiki. Instead they should get free 64kbps or 1mbps (or whatever the market can bear). "Zero rating" is harmful because content providers and telecoms get to decide what is worth providing for "free". It's never really free because in the end someone is paying for bandwidth. Voice calls, text, and IP are all just data. If I pay for 20/5mbps, give me that. If I have a fixed speed of 20mbps, I do not have "unlimited data" so there is no need to monitor and cap. It is 20mbps / 8 * 86400 seconds * 30 days = 6TB per month max. 64kbps is 20GB/month max. Nobody's browsing 24/7 at max. speed on mobile so there is very little chance a mobile user in free data plan of 64kbps is really going to use 20GB of data per month. Wikipedia should consistently support Net Neutrality throughout the world regardless of local deals. If they really want to help consumers in poor countries, fight for them to get a slow data plan that can be used not only for Wikipedia but also Khan Academy, MIT OpenCourseWare, or anything else the user wants to see.

guelo 12y ago

This is a bullshit stance by Wikipedia. If when Wikipedia started there had been some popular ad supported encyclopedia that received preferential ISP treatment Wikipedia would not exist today. Maybe it makes sense for the established internet companies to oppose net neutrality because they're the ones that would get packaged up by the ISPs. But it's bad for everyone else.

pulgrot 12y ago
Does the end result of more people having free access to the information wikipedia provides, justify the zero rating/preferential treatment by ISPs of the site?
- sparkzilla 12y ago
  No, Because it closes out competition to newer, better information.
  - username223 12y ago
    Like Demand Media? Would it be a bad thing for people to have free access to Wikipedia and Open Street Maps? They could always pay for Demand and GMaps if they wanted to.
  - Golf_Hotel_Mike 12y ago
    >No, Because it closes out competition to newer, better information. But that would only make sense if Wikipedia created some sort of insurmountable barrier for newer, better information. It doesn't. Newer, better information can reach people through Wikipedia with just as much ease (provided it fits Wiki's publishing standards) as it would through any other platform. For all intents and purposes, Wikipedia and other similar open and free general knowledge sources can (and perhaps should) be regarded as a public good. We don't complain that the government's monopoly on building public roads closes out competition to 'newer, better roads'. We recognize that these roads are vital public infrastructure. Platforms like Wikipedia should be no different.

legohead 12y ago

This isn't a dilemma. You can have net neutrality and also have Wikipedia Zero -- it isn't mutually exclusive. It might make it a little harder and Wikipedia may need to ask for more donations, but this is their goal, not anyone else's. Wikipedia isn't the internet.

yzzxy 12y ago

Serious question, as I don't really have a strong opinion on zero rating either way: In a scenario where zero-rating is available to all actors at equivalent prices, is there still a problem? It would raise the barrier to entry for internet companies perhaps, but probably not by too much. I guess you could argue it encourages bandwidth capping? I'd like to hear arguments from both sides.

guelo 12y ago
Not mentioned in the article is that Wikipedia refuses to pay to participate in zero rating. In the world you envision only profitable commercial sites would be available.
brianpan 12y ago
Unless that price is zero, that's exactly what net neutrality is trying to avoid- an uneven playing field.
cegev 12y ago
>In a scenario where zero-rating is available to all actors at equivalent prices, is there still a problem? It would raise the barrier to entry for internet companies perhaps, but probably not by too much. I guess you could argue it encourages bandwidth capping? An alternative, would be to allow zero-rating through free prioritization. Give either web services or consumers the choice of "this is an important connection: per-byte-rate and give higher priority," or "this isn't so important: zero-rate and give lower priority." That way VoIP and other latency/rate-critical services could operate more reliably, while BitTorrent, home cloud storage and others could operate without congesting the network and without data cap problems. If this choice was allowed in an automated way, it would not seem to cause any unfairness, or keep smaller/newer players off the market.

kazinator 12y ago

Net non-neutrality used to overcome severe data caps so some poor buggers can browse the Wikipedia? This really sounds like trying to add one wrong to another to try to make a right. This really confuses issues too; metered access to a network isn't quite the same thing as non-neutral access where some content gets much better latency and bandwidth. Cutting off access to all sources of content at a given data cap does in fact meet the definition of neutral: No Netflix for you, and no Usenet, no Skype, no IRC, no git, no ssh, ... Data caps in fact hurt the high-bandwidth premium services that easily bust data caps, whose purveyors support non-neutrality.

belorn 12y ago

This seems very similar to the postal system when it give free-of-charge service for humanitarian aid. It seems a very strict interpretation of the common carrier principle to disallow it on the basis that its discriminating against those who has to pay. What is the threat model to net neutrality for cases when there is no exchange of payments?

_greim_ 12y ago

If your meritocracy is just a snapshot of whoever's best at a specific time, then you don't have a meritocracy. In other words, what happens when a new, better source of information comes online?

dragonwriter 12y ago

This is kind of at the peripheries of net neutrality. I don't recall any proposed "net neutrality" related regulations -- whether the 2010 Open Internet Order, the NPRM from earlier this year, or any of the concrete alternatives proposed -- that would have prohibited zero-rating on mobile networks that have data volume charges. This isn't even the same thing as paid prioritization (which the recent NPRM may still have allowed, within some bounds), where edge providers are given a choice to pay the ISP or have packets get lower delivery priority -- the ability of the customer to connect and the quality of service provided on the connection isn't affected by the payment, the customer gets exactly the service they would get connecting to an edge provider that hadn't made a deal with the access provider. The only difference is that the customer doesn't have to pay for the data consumption (which essentially is equivalent to the edge provider reimbursing the consumer for the data cost, except presumably the costs are lower commensurate with the simplicity of a direct edge provider to access provider payment route.) So, while certainly this kind of thing might raise concerns related to net neutrality, its not what the focus of the net neutrality debate and regulatory effort has been.

chimeracoder 12y ago
> So, while certainly this kind of thing might raise concerns related to net neutrality, its not what the focus of the net neutrality debate and regulatory effort has been. Well, that's because this wasn't a threat (in the US) until relatively recently, unlike paid prioritization and/or throttling. That doesn't mean that zero-rating doesn't violate the same principles as paid prioritization does. If you take a look at the doomsday scenario that Fred Wilson outlines in "VC Pitches In A Year Or Two"[0], the situation could just as easily apply to a zero-rated world. You can think of zero-rating as "slow lanes", the speed on the slow lane is set to zero. (In a way, zero-rating is actually worse than paid prioritization, because it achieves the same end result, but placing a more consumer-friendly facade on the same rotten interior.) > This is kind of at the peripheries of net neutrality. I don't recall any proposed "net neutrality" related regulations -- whether the 2010 Open Internet Order, the NPRM from earlier this year, or any of the concrete alternatives proposed -- that would have prohibited zero-rating on mobile networks that have data volume charges. I also don't recall any large-scale[1] efforts to impose zero-rating on mobile consumers until the last year or so, which is why net neutrality legislation hasn't focused on it. In general, legislation around consumer protections tends to be reactive rather than proactive, and net neutrality has definitely followed this pattern. [0] http://avc.com/2014/01/vc-pitches-in-a-year-or-two/ http://avc.com/2014/01/vc-pitches-in-a-year-or-two/ [1] (Yes, they existed in some cases, but they were very limited and relatively obscure.)

gioele 12y ago

For those who think Wikipedia is right in defending Wikipedia Zero, could you please elaborate on how this will not impact the adoption of any alternative encyclopaedic website?

err4nt 12y ago
Can you fork Wikipedia? I remember back in the day it was all open licensed and downloadable, but it's grown quite a bit since then.

dlitz 12y ago

Wikipedia Zero creates a financial penalty for users who want to preserve their privacy by using Wikipedia over Tor. I wonder what folks here think about the ethics of that.

pmontra 12y ago

A better solution: no data caps, even if it has to be enforced by regulations.

rmc 12y ago
But bandwidth is a limited medium. It is fair IMO that those who use it a lot should pay more,
- pmontra 12y ago
  Which doesn't mean having a data cap. It could be 1$ per GB on wireless devices (where bandwidth is really limited because of collisions with everybody's else traffic) or whatever amount it makes sense. Wikipedia pages are quite skinny. Servers usually pay per GB with many VPS providers right now, with a monthly quota included in the base fee. If you have your own datacenter you pay per GB in other ways. That said, subsidising the access to one own website could be seen as a fair commercial practice or anticompetitive behavior. It depends on so many factors that I don't even want to get into it.

stefantalpalaru 12y ago

There's a better solution than zero rating on mobile plans: a very low bandwidth (4-8 KiB/s) unlimited connection once the full speed limit is reached. TIM does this in Italy and it doesn't care what sites you access in this low bandwidth regime.

rakoo 12y ago
The thing is that zero rating can be promoted by platforms such as Wikipedia and Facebook, who want to promote net neutrality; unlimited low speed connection is an ISP-only thing, and I haven't seen many big ISPs (really) promote net neutrality.