On Fri, May 30, 2014 at 5:43 AM, C. Scott Ananian cananian@wikimedia.org wrote:
This is a fascinating discussion, but one which has been addressed in much greater depth elsewhere: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=net+neutrality+wikipedia+zero
It would indeed be interesting to hear EFF's take on the matter, which does not appear to have been stated publicly yet.
Some related links: http://theumlaut.com/2014/04/30/how-net-neutrality-hurts-the-poor/ see especially the first comment, which claims that "You[r] concept of net neutrality is technically, and wildly incorrect. [...] Net neutrality has *nothing whatsoever* to do with access. Especially access for poor users. It has to do with service providers being treated equally and fairly on the *infrastructure* that allows users access to those services." (I don't know if I actually agree with this, but it's an interesting distinction.)
http://manypossibilities.net/2014/05/net-neutrality-in-africa/
And the discussion starting here: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/advocacy_advisors/2014-April/000472.htm...
One distinction which has been made in discussions concerns who is paying for what, and who is profiting.
There are not many ways to make a profit on 'free content' (zero-rated)...
Zero-rating a commercial service which pays the telecom for the privilege, might be regulated differently than zero-rating a non-profit service with no money changing hands. (Does WP Zero actually pay any telecom to be zero-rated?)
So how are the telco's making money from WP Zero?
The main reason for ISPs to zero-rate content is because they want to cache it to lower their interconnect / international traffic costs and free up their outgoing pipes, and ideally keep their cache in sync when their pipes are underutilised (i.e. refreshing mirrors when their customer base is asleep.). The other is because someone with deep pockets turns up and asks please provide this content for free to your customers in order to gain access to their customers and prevent competitors starting up. (i.e. Google and Facebook)
As you say, WMF is not paying these telcos to shove WP down their customers throats. So, is WP Zero a caching mechanism?
If not, the Telcos are making a loss. Why?
The concern wrt Telco's who are now in the ISP market, is they are happy to spend a lot of money to erode the 'Internet' principle of zero termination fees. They would prefer to charge both 'ends' of their pipes - content providers and content consumers - as that is what Telco's are used to doing.
Packaging some content for free, and charging high prices for "the real internet", encourages the practise of agreements between content providers and telco's, which of course creates an internet that favours large content providers and reduces the ability for new competitors to enter the market.
While 'Wikimedia' is a non-profit, and no money changing hands, we should be concerned about the long term effects that this will have on other non-profit free content producers. Do we want our peers in this space to be having to negotiate with telco's around the world in order to distribute their free content?
Along the lines of what what Jens Best is saying, I'll believe the telco's goals are pure when I see them zero-rating Project Gutenberg, and I'll be sceptical of the WMF's goals so long as it is only 'Wikipedia Zero', and not packaging into the 'zero-rated' agreement the sister projects like Wiktionary and Commons especially, but also Wikisource, etc, and ideally these telco's also agree to put the database dumps on their mirrors too, zero-rated.
-- John Vandenberg