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

[Jimmy Wales]

I agree that the Wikimedia Foundation can have no position on such an
issue.  We are neutral, politically.

Individuals, though, can and do have positions of course.  :)

Delirium wrote:
> 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
> 
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> 


-- 
#######################################################################
#    Office: 1-727-231-0101       |  Free Culture and  Free Knowledge #
#    http://www.wikipedia.org     |     Building a free world         #
#######################################################################