Wikipedia’s ‘complicated’ relationship with net neutrality

From memory:

* Dial-up in the 28.8k era was per-minute. Occasional $700 AOL bill. Mom was pissed.

* Dial-up in the 33.6k through 56k eras was flat-rate. Start a download before bed, enjoy it in the morning.

* Broadband, pre 3mbps era. Flat rate.

* Netzero: Back to dialup, but now free. (Especially if you replaced their dialer software with a pencil-and-paper key to the Caesar cipher they used for auth.)

* Cellular. Sorta based on SMS rates.

* Broadband, 10mbps. Some companies have caps. Only a subset of users notice them, nobody had their back.

* Mobile. Smart phones! But the device is the limiting factor, not the network.

* Broadband, every major provider has caps written into the contract, but few enable technical enforcement of the caps. I smell deception: "We've always had these caps, you must have increased your usage!"

* Mobile, post 3g: pay per byte, period.

Precisely. I am trying to see the "complex" moral dilemma part of this issue that Wikipedia claims but I can't. For a fixed price, people should get a fixed speed - on wireless or broadband. That's it. Every byte of data should be treated the same. Disadvantaged consumers should not get free FB or Wiki. Instead they should get free 64kbps or 1mbps (or whatever the market can bear).

"Zero rating" is harmful because content providers and telecoms get to decide what is worth providing for "free". It's never really free because in the end someone is paying for bandwidth.

Voice calls, text, and IP are all just data. If I pay for 20/5mbps, give me that. If I have a fixed speed of 20mbps, I do not have "unlimited data" so there is no need to monitor and cap. It is 20mbps / 8 * 86400 seconds * 30 days = 6TB per month max. 64kbps is 20GB/month max. Nobody's browsing 24/7 at max. speed on mobile so there is very little chance a mobile user in free data plan of 64kbps is really going to use 20GB of data per month.

Wikipedia should consistently support Net Neutrality throughout the world regardless of local deals. If they really want to help consumers in poor countries, fight for them to get a slow data plan that can be used not only for Wikipedia but also Khan Academy, MIT OpenCourseWare, or anything else the user wants to see.

In the US or in Sub-Saharan Africa?

I tend to agree with the WMF that in parts of the world where millions of people are using a smartphone as their first computer, providing free information is key to wikimedia's mission. I think that the world would be better off if all websites were treated equally by all ISPs, but I also think the world would be better off if millions of people who have never had a computer before can have the access to information that we take for granted. Given that the WMF is unlikely to be able to change telecom policy or business practices in all these countries, I think it's better to work within the existing system and provide a resource that would otherwise be costly (perhaps prohibitively so).

Having said that, many Wikimedians disagree with me.

You brought up three issues: (i) Anti-competitiveness in music streaming (ii) Anti-competitiveness in social networks (in developing regions) (iii) Effect of zero-rated services on congestion

(i) http://www.t-mobile.com/offer/music-freedom-list.html This is a large enough list that I wouldn't worry about anti-competitiveness. It is still them vs. everyone else, but looking at the list right now, the barriers to entry cannot be that high, which means any anti-competitive effect cannot be that high either. I and most others in my income category (college undergrads) are willing to accept this in order to have free music streaming.

(ii) Facebook (in some parts of the developing world) is a slightly different issue, and not necessarily one that I agree with. Still, zero rating popular websites in the developing world seems to be win-win-win for consumers, carriers, and content providers, and ignoring market forces is simply not a solution. Especially if the target demographic simply cannot afford to pay for data - this is an entirely different market and I don't have the experience to form an opinion on this. Edited my original post to remove Facebook.

(iii) Let's assume all paid traffic should be treated equally. And to keep things fair to paying customers, paid traffic should be prioritized over free traffic. I'm willing to bet this already happens indirectly - by lowering the music quality when the network is congested.

But what if I have Spotify Premium - I (indirectly) pay for my traffic, so why should your maps app be any more important?

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Obviously there are tough questions here, and a "one size fits all" net neutrality approach for wireless and broadband might not be the best solution.

If wireless was as cheap and fast as broadband, I would be all for net neutrality on wireless. But it's not. They are different 'products' in economic terms (even if they have a similar end result and "feel the same"), and I think it's therefore okay for policies that govern them to be different.

Does the end result of more people having free access to the information wikipedia provides, justify the zero rating/preferential treatment by ISPs of the site?