Wikimedia doesn't support Net Neutrality

[0] https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/08/01/wikipedia-zero-and-net...

you have a plan that has access to certain websites (spotify, etc) that you pay $X/month for.

That is violating NN, in your opinion.

But if X is $0, then it's not violating NN.

How does changing the price change the discrimination between websites? A zero-rated plan is still a plan.

> And I don't think Wikipedia's competitors would think this "keeps the playing field level" either. How would they compete against Wikipedia, when their users have to pay to access their service, but dont have to pay to access wikipedia?

I disagree for two reasons:

• First, as a matter of general principle I prefer to minimize overlap of different regulatory frameworks. We have a general framework for dealing with anticompetitive actions and practices--antitrust law. If for some reason antitrust law cannot deal with competition issues that zero rating Wikipedia cause, let's beef up antitrust law to deal with it.

Same goes for some other areas that are often included in net neutrality, such as privacy and transparency. I don't want a separate law for these things for each kind of business. They are general things that should be independent of type of business.

(I'm open to arguments that it is politically impossible to get a good general privacy law, for instance, passed and so we may have to settle for doing these things on a type of business by type of businesses basis in things like net neutrality regulations).

• Second, most of what an ISP could accomplish with zero rating could be accomplished by other means that would be less efficient but not use the internet (and so completely avoid any possibility of net neutrality issues), but would have largely the same impact on consumers.

For example, suppose Comcast decided to offer a streaming music service of their own, and decided to zero rate it. There are a couple ways they could do this. Before listing them, though, a brief overview of how cable internet works.

The cable that comes into your house has something like 2 GHz of bandwidth. Comcast divides this into about 300 separate channels with 6 MHz of bandwidth each. In the old days, these low level 6 MHz channels carried analog TV signals, but nowadays they carry digital streams. Each of these digital streams is divided into several sub-streams all multiplexed onto the low level 6 MHz stream. They build all their services on top of those streams and sub-streams. Internet service is provided by combining several streams (enough to support your download speed) and running IP on top of that, with another low level stream used for upload.

The key point here is that Comcast has a bunch of data steams into and out of your house that are running a lower level protocol than IP.

So how could Comcast offer a streaming music service, designed to be playable on any device that you put on your home Comcast network?

1. They could simply run it on the web, and users access it over the internet.

2. They could run it at a lower level, running it on a sub-channel of one of their low level 6 MHz channels, with an app on their set-top boxes to interface to it. The app could make the music and control interface available on the LAN (wired and/or wifi) via a simple web server running on the set-top box.

Note that with #2, there is no internet involved. The music starts on Comcast's internal network, and is transported to your LAN over a layer that is lower level than IP, where it is served on the LAN.

But note that from a user point of view, these two are pretty much the same. In both cases to play Comcast streaming music on your home devices you go to a website which streams them to you. In #1 that website happens to be off your LAN, and in #2 it is on your LAN.

It makes no sense to me to say that in case #1 Comcast cannot provide the service at no extra charge, but that in case #2 they can.

I think net neutrality should be simple:

• Your ISP must provide the speed and bandwidth promised, for the price promised. You can use up to the promised bandwidth, for anything you see fit and you will get the promised speed, without blocking or throttling, except if the ISP is legally required.

That's pretty much it. Everything else should be covered by other more general regulations (antitrust, consumer protection).

There was also a company trying to deploy a series of satellites to provide persistent, free (but low bandwidth) access to a small cross-section of the internet, with a focus on education and information. I wish I could remember that company's name.

Or they collude to keep fees artificially high. Witness the disparity between American and European cellular plan rates. They all just happened to decide that we can't have sub-$30 plans despite "competition".

One example that always springs to mind, was Australian friends online in the early 2000's who told me their ISP had linux mirrors - which was of great value to them, because they were charged less (if at all) for data within their ISP's networks. They were also much faster, since it meant the data wasn't trans-oceanic. Later Steam came up as another example of the same idea.

They thought this was fantastic. It solved a lot of problems (and expense, and speed) for them. But it's not particularly 'neutral' either, is it? Given the choice between a distro that's on my ISP's mirror, and a distro where I have to slug data from the other side of the planet, I'm going to make a choice based on my ISP's preferences.

Putting a wikipedia cache/mirror within the ISP's network would, in this example, render pretty much the same results as "wikipedia zero". Same benefits, same concerns.

I'm not really arguing this one way or the other. Just that it does muddy the water when we have examples that benefit the enduser, to counter the scarier examples we see elsewhere.

There was an attempt by Facebook to introduce zero rating in India through a big telco, which failed due to the protests... and guess what? The telco launched high speed internet services free for an entire year(google Reliance Jio) and even after that its almost free(1$/month/30gb), without any limits whatsoever.. had there been zero rating, they would have simply not released the lower priced service..

If your question is why shouldn't tellcos be allowed to give wikipedia away for free, then that is a more complex question that requires a more complex answer.

But it is a question that is entirely unrelated to the present net neutrality debate as it is happening in the US. The present debate is about telco services for which people pay a lot of money for. It is not about connecting the previously unconnected poor but about limiting the connections for people that are already connected and expect to stay connected.

Perhaps there should be an exception made to net neutrality for services for the poor that are free of charge. The same way food shelters do not have to comply with the same laws as restaurants. Fine by me, but this is beside the point and not germane to the main net neutrality discussion.

Links are the essence of the Internet. Internet broken up in unclickable silos will have huge effects.