On Tue, 23 Sep 2014, Cristian Consonni wrote:
Secondly, I would like to know if the idea of "lobbyists are using Wikipedia Zero to crack net neutrality" is a theoretical thing or it is happening now as in "there are actual lobbyists going around advocating Wikipedia Zero for their own purposes" (and I mean Wikipedia Zero *specifically* not zero rating in general). As the case of Chile is showing, I would like to know if something we think (in this case "Wikipedia Zero can be treated as an exception because it's free knowledge") is a theoretical possibility (even if it is a reasonable possibility) or if it is something that is happening on the ground.
I'd like to share my perspective here, although this year I've been much less active but I still keep a very good contact to various media organisations (among others).
In Poland we have had an open clash of the pro-Internet and pro-content-segregation lobbyists on the ground of online advertisting. T-Mobile has openly threatened to cut and replace ads on their network with their own. This is obviously a reminescence of battles with Internet giants like Google and Poland has been chosen to be a guinea pig to test market, regulatory and media response.
I don't remember and I don't believe that Wikipedia Zero was actually used in such discussion.
There is yet another context of this story which needs to be mentioned - it is the difficulty of engaging the Wikipedia community in public affairs. I think even this very mailing list is an attempt to bridge and coordinate efforts in this area.
I do observe a certain level of mistrust of the core editing community ("we just want to write an encyclopaedia here") towards various Internet activists. Even mild activities of the Polish Wikimedia chapter in this area have been criticized by some. Sometimes I have a feeling some community members would like to have the difficult job of lobbying outsourced to some other organizations and leave Wikipedia brand pure and virgin, free of any kind of decision-influencing (ergo, political) activity. The mistrust of the community is not only directed towards activits - also the initial agreement between Wikimedia Foundation and Orange (implemented in Poland as one of the first markets) - had been a subject of a lively debate within the community itself.
I have personally had committed lots of energy to convince "the community" (whoever it was on the talk page) to join the ACTA protects back then. In the end, it was a Wikimedia community voice that was a tipping point for media attention and the whole thing resulted in massive street protests seldomly seen in this country. Or at least it was one of the major factors.
I don't think the net neutrality debate has taken proper shape in our media; certainly I don't think that media organisations have researched the the material properly to find out about Wikipedia Zero and its implications.
But this subject raises many eyebrows in our internal discussions, "if we don't want that Internet access is only limited to Facebook for free, how is Wikipedia Zero different?". We feel we don't have a satisfactory answer to this should the question pop up.
In the end, are we building a community or are we just one of the "permium content" websites, which needs to expand in order to stay relevant?
//Marcin
saper@plwikipedia