On Dec 1, 2014 8:26 AM, "Mark" delirium@hackish.org wrote:
On 12/1/14, 7:11 AM, Milos Rancic wrote:
There are some items -- abused or not for marketing purposes of the entities used for achieving interests of their shareholders -- which
belong
to the corpus of common good. Like air and free knowledge are, for
example.
If an ISP wanted to make *all* online free-knowledge resources exempt
from per-MB data charges, that would be a much more interesting proposal. It's the differential pricing between different sources of knowledge that I find more troubling: why should a user pay more to access the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy than Wikipedia? That's already attempting to shape, via differential pricing, where online users get their information.
I agree that we should coordinate with the participants of the broader free knowledge and free software movement and include their sites while negotiating with mobile carries.
In the meantime this is what we have. Some corporations find that it's clever PR idea not to charge for oxygen. That's not fully useful, but it's quite essential. The next target is nitrogen, then we should take care of other gases to make air completely free.
Counting the tendency initiated by WMF, net neutrality should move to exclusively commercial or market terrain. I agree with that, but it's not about us. Free content is common good and we are fortunate that mobile providers will be soon forced to recognize that. (First it's about clever PR, then it becomes the norm.)