Jens writes:

(I'm still a little bit irritated by your rhetoric trickery, Mike, when calling the usual and established understanding of net neutrality repeatedly "absolutist". This cheap rhetorical maneuver doesn't fit you.)

I suppose at this point I could declare that its "rhetorical trickery," Jens, for you to declare my honest expression of my opinion regarding network neutrality to be "rhetorical trickery." (It's actually a reflection of discussions I had with my colleagues at the Internet Governance Forum in Istanbul earlier this year.)

I frankly don't see why you need to understand my beliefs regarding network neutrality as "cheap rhetorical maneuver" when in fact there has always been variation among net-neutrality activists as to what "network neutrality" might mean. I've been writing about the subject for eight years now, and my writing on the issue is publicly available. In general, a "cheap" maneuver is one that takes little investment, and I've clearly invested more than most people. As for "trickery," it hardly seems to me to be a trick when I'm not concealing anything.

I want to suggest that if your first impulse is to criticize my motives rather than to Assume Good Faith, you may want to consider that I get nothing personally out of (a) advocating Wikipedia Zero, an initiative that post-dates my tenure as WMF staff, or (b) talking about network neutrality in a way that recognizes the particular issues that mobile platform providers invoke.

As I pointed have pointed out, we *already* qualify network neutrality with exceptions. These exceptions have not been ones you've noticed before now, as far as i know. Should Wikipedia Zero be an exception? I think so, for the reasons I've stated, as well as for the general proposition that people in developing nations need unfettered access to Wikipedia content now, and should not have to wait until the Promised Land of generally unmetered access to mobile platforms is created (which may not occur in our lifetimes).

It would be good for WMF to admit that with the best intentions a mistake was made which scale wasn't really thought through before.

It would be better if one didn't begin with the assumption that no one at WMF thought hard about these issues before Wikipedia Zero was launched. And still better, in terms of effective persuasion, if you didn't begin by assuming bad faith (e.g., "rhetorical trickery" on the part of those who disagree with you. After all, I don't assume bad faith on your part. .

--Mike