Dear James,
your praising of WP0 surely deserves or even needs an appropiated answer,
but as I can't see my answering mail to Gerard's input from yesterday
published in this mailinglist so I will wait until this "moderated".
When I see that my email with the answer to Gerard is published in the
mailinglist I will take the time to explain you why net neutrality is more
than you suggest and why we need to be a little bit less starry-eyed when
it comes to the reasons why telecoms are behaving sooo nice to Wikipedia.
Also I will add some remarks about why a little bit more humbleness from
the "we are the knowledge of the world"-fraction would be appropiated in
the whole discussion.
best regards
Jens
2015-04-01 18:37 GMT+02:00 James Salsman <jsalsman(a)gmail.com>om>:
Jens,
Why do you say net neutrality has anything to do with price? It's about
best-effort delivery of packets without censorship or, for example,
treating packets that say "do you want to join our radical fundamentalist
agnostic cell," the same way as we treat packets that say, "do you want to
subscribe to our newsletter."
In 1973, the packet switching X.25 systems which resemble today's internet
more closely than the IMP point-to-point testing at the time had no
provisions for packet inspection or "quality of service" adjustments. But
if you didn't subscribe to a database that you might want to access (which
may or may not cost money) then you had no access because if there were no
login credentials then you could tell everyone how to use the database when
it could only handle on the order of dozens of users at a time. What you
want in saying that you think zero rating violates net neutrality is the
MIT open Multics movement, which exists on the internet today in the form
of free and ad-supported hosting services like Wikia. Net neutrality is
about no preferred qualities of packet delivery service, because those
are best handled by adaptive rate coding at the application layer, which is
what the WMF causes the implementation of when they contract with cell
carriers to allow access to Wikipedia content for no charge. The fact that
Wikipedia is civilization's best summary of accumulated knowledge so far is
the reason why carriers are willing to provide the transmission power to
their users at no charge in areas where they still ordinarily compete on a
per-bit fee. That is an economic application design choice that has nothing
to do with packet delivery choices.
Similarly, in the 1860s the Hayes printing telegraph ticker tape had no
restrictions on who could send a transmission or what it's content might
be, and in cases of congestion, the operator noticing a collision first
would back off, and the other would re-transmit in an egalitarian
fashion, but the data you sent would obtain a response in proportion to the
amount the recipient was being paid.
Wikipedia Zero is a great program and I hope something like Wikiversity
Zero assessments will be how hundreds of millions of people learn new facts
pertinent to their lives and helpful to them in ten years. With adaptive
instruction coupled to Wikipedia Accuracy Review, I believe that such a
system will support the transition from creating new articles to
maintaining existing content. I hope both the WMF and the WEF support this
effort, because if the WEF was paying for it, it would likely not influence
the safe harbor provisions protecting the WMF from legal liability due to
inaccuracies. I am sad when dictatorships use Wikipedia Zero for propaganda
purposes, but I am not sure how much of a problem that is relative to the
advantages.
Best regards,
James Salsman