[Foundation-l] H.R. 5252 and H.R. 5417

[Delirium]

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