Lord Voldemort wrote:
Recently, legislation in the United States House of Representatives has been introduced that may have an impact on Wikimedia. The bills in question are H.R. 5252 and H.R. 5417, and can be seen in their entirety by searching for them on http://thomas.loc.gov/ . The aforementioned bills deal with "net neutrality", restricting phone and cable companies' ability to control aspects of the Internet and its distribution.
As this may have a direct impact on Wikimedia Foundation, I was wondering if WMF had an official position on the matter. "Internet" companies such as Yahoo, Google, eBay, and others have made their official positions known, so I was wondering if WMF had discussed this issue. If I am just way behind the times, would someone mind directing me to the appropriate location? Thanks.
For those unfamiliar, the issue is that some telecommunications companies have considered offering, for a fee, a service where operators of internet services (like websites) can receive a guarantee of higher-priority traffic. So if, say, CNN paid a telecomm company a bunch of money, CNN's traffic would get a higher priority than other traffic over that company's wires, and therefore CNN would appear to users to be faster. There is some legislation proposed that would prohibit that.
I personally don't think this is the sort of issue the Wikimedia Foundation should be involved in--- It's a political and ethical question that Wikimedians ought to be able to disagree on. The competing interests are a desire to keep the internet relatively egalitarian versus a desire not to unduly restrict private companies' rights to engage in whatever sort of commerce they wish to engage in, with the right balance depending partly on how much of a monopoly a particular company has in its market. On the whole I would hope these sorts of things don't become commonplace, but whether they ought to be prohibited is a tougher issue, and one that I think is mostly depends on non-Wikimedia-related political issues (like where you stand on government regulation of utilities in general).
I think in the specific case of the Wikimedia Foundation, it'll have negligible impact. We're large enough and have little enough competition that the power balance tips more our way than their way---if Wikipedia is slower on one ISP than on one of their competitors, that will reflect badly on that ISP. And in any case, latency caused by differential IP-traffic priority is likely to be negligible compared to latency caused by things like hitting the database.
-Mark