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Wikipedia’s ‘complicated’ relationship with net neutrality

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Wikipedia’s ‘complicated’ relationship with net neutrality

#51

Post by wodenokoto »

mrbabbage wrote: post #3

This is super interesting! Thanks for sharing. I believe this is a good illustration of how most net neutrality advocacy is misguided. The (very real) problem net neutrality advocates are trying to solve isn't paid prioritization; rather, it's a lack of meaningful competition in the "last-mile" broadband market, and this market failure produces aberrant scenarios like NBC Comcast shaking down its competitors (eg Netf…

I disagree. Rather than Internet.org giving free access to wikipedia and facebook, they should just give people 100mb free data and let them decide what is best for them.

Re: Wikipedia’s ‘complicated’ relationship with net neutrality

#52

Post by Aeoxic »

rayiner wrote: post #47
mrbabbage wrote: post #3

This is super interesting! Thanks for sharing. I believe this is a good illustration of how most net neutrality advocacy is misguided. The (very real) problem net neutrality advocates are trying to solve isn't paid prioritization; rather, it's a lack of meaningful competition in the "last-mile" broadband market, and this market failure produces aberrant scenarios like NBC Comcast shaking down its competitors (eg Netf…

Even in a competitive market, Comcast wants to, and can, vertically integrate with NBC then punish its competitors for the same reason Apple wants to vertically integrate content/software/hardware and push out anyone that competes with any part of that stack. There's a huge, technical, advantage to having the content company also own the network: pushing caching nodes to the edges of the network, consolidating redund…

> It's not all that different to the advantages of vertically integrating iTunes/iOS/Apple Ax-based hardware.

It's different due to the fact that Internet is a "utility" now in the same way gas, electricity and water are (isn't it considered a human right in the USA now?). An Apple iPhone is not in any way a utility, and its functionality can be made up, 1:1 (fanboyism aside, thank you) by another device. iTunes (the store) is not a utility, and its functionality can be made up, 1:1, by purchasing CDs or using Google Play / Spotify / Rdio. iTunes (the app) is not a utility for obvious reasons.

Yes Apple locks you into an ecosystem, however that ecosystem is not a fundamental "requirement" to function as a business. There's simply no replacement for the Internet and, in a lot of places, there's no replacement for $ISP.

Re: Wikipedia’s ‘complicated’ relationship with net neutrality

#53

Post by username223 »

sparkzilla wrote: post #48
pulgrot wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, Because it closes out competition to newer, better information.

Like Demand Media? Would it be a bad thing for people to have free access to Wikipedia and Open Street Maps? They could always pay for Demand and GMaps if they wanted to.

Re: Wikipedia’s ‘complicated’ relationship with net neutrality

#54

Post by GabrielF00 »

solipsism wrote: post #29
GabrielF00 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 befor…

But you didn't answer the question, did you? 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 Like Netflix? Or only like Wikipedia? That's the question. Are you saying it's more important for Sub-Saharan Africans to get access to Wikipedia than Netflix? Netflix might disagree. scholarpedia.org might ha…

I think I did answer the question. I don't think that users should be billed for Internet access based on what they use, and I don't think that carriers should be able to play favorites when it comes to content providers. However, given that the wireless industry in many third-world countries works this way, and given that the WMF is unlikely to change either business practices or telecom policy in these countries, I would much rather see the WMF work within the system and try to provide free resources to people then refuse to participate on principle.

There's a huge practical benefit to Wikimedia Zero - people who have very limited access to information resources can get these great resources for free. Balanced against that, I just don't see how not participating benefits anybody, except, perhaps, by letting some people in San Francisco and Cambridge, MA feel good about standing up for an abstract principle.

Re: Wikipedia’s ‘complicated’ relationship with net neutrality

#55

Post by Golf_Hotel_Mike »

sparkzilla wrote: post #48
pulgrot wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, Because it closes out competition to newer, better information.

>No, Because it closes out competition to newer, better information.

But that would only make sense if Wikipedia created some sort of insurmountable barrier for newer, better information. It doesn't. Newer, better information can reach people through Wikipedia with just as much ease (provided it fits Wiki's publishing standards) as it would through any other platform.

For all intents and purposes, Wikipedia and other similar open and free general knowledge sources can (and perhaps should) be regarded as a public good. We don't complain that the government's monopoly on building public roads closes out competition to 'newer, better roads'. We recognize that these roads are vital public infrastructure. Platforms like Wikipedia should be no different.

Re: Wikipedia’s ‘complicated’ relationship with net neutrality

#56

Post by dingaling »

amalcon wrote: post #27
daveloyall wrote: post #9

There was no concept of 'zero-rating' before telecoms/ISPs established the concept of a 'rate-per-byte'.

While this is technically correct, it suggests a causation that just isn't there. Metered per-byte rates have existed since at least the 1990s. Datacenter bandwidth has historically always been metered, though typically on a 95/5 rate basis. This is also how mobile data has historically been billed: data packages really only took off with the relase of the iPhone, and before that most people just paid per-kb (which i…

> data packages really only took off with the relase of the iPhone

Please, no more iPhone revisionism. T Mobile Web & Walk packages launched in 2005 with 1GB and 2GB monthly caps; the latter was the 'Pro' package IIRC. Other carriers quickly followed.

Certainly my Nokia E smartphones of the pre-iPhone era all used such packages for browsing / e-mail / IRC.

Re: Wikipedia’s ‘complicated’ relationship with net neutrality

#57

Post by skuhn »

amalcon wrote: post #27
daveloyall wrote: post #9

There was no concept of 'zero-rating' before telecoms/ISPs established the concept of a 'rate-per-byte'.

While this is technically correct, it suggests a causation that just isn't there. Metered per-byte rates have existed since at least the 1990s. Datacenter bandwidth has historically always been metered, though typically on a 95/5 rate basis. This is also how mobile data has historically been billed: data packages really only took off with the relase of the iPhone, and before that most people just paid per-kb (which i…

95th percentile billing is not like the per-byte billing that ISPs and other parties try to enforce. 95th percentile billing uses your instantaneous bandwidth utilization, which directly correlates to how you have to size network equipment, and therefore to how much it costs to operate the service.

Per-byte billing does not directly map to how much it costs your provider to transfer your data. I can utilize a link to send 1kbit/s for a month, which is 2.47Tbit of data transferred. That sounds like a lot, but what burden does 1kbit/s place on your provider? Virtually nil. And yet carriers with data caps will charge massive overage fees or heavily throttle usage because of usage like this.

AWS bills per-byte for outbound data, so I'll use that for a concrete example. Lets say that I have a small service that uses 1gbit/s for 30 days.

  Commodity transit:
  billed at 95th percentile
  $2.00 / mbit
  $1000 circuit commit
  = $2000 / mo

  AWS:
  billed per-byte
  $0.05 / GByte (using their cheapest tier for simplicity)
  = $16,200 / mo
There is no major difference here between what it costs the provider to transfer my packets. If anything, Amazon can get better deals on transit than a small startup can. Yet I would pay Amazon nearly ten times as much, simply because their billing metric does not bear any relation to their cost to serve. This is rent-seeking behavior and it should not be allowed to become the default way that ISPs and other service providers bill customers.

Re: Wikipedia’s ‘complicated’ relationship with net neutrality

#58

Post by adrianN »

wodenokoto wrote: post #51
mrbabbage wrote: post #3

This is super interesting! Thanks for sharing. I believe this is a good illustration of how most net neutrality advocacy is misguided. The (very real) problem net neutrality advocates are trying to solve isn't paid prioritization; rather, it's a lack of meaningful competition in the "last-mile" broadband market, and this market failure produces aberrant scenarios like NBC Comcast shaking down its competitors (eg Netf…

I disagree. Rather than Internet.org giving free access to wikipedia and facebook, they should just give people 100mb free data and let them decide what is best for them.

This is different to giving free access to Wikipedia. You can download Gigabytes of Wikipedia articles every month without paying for it. A better alternative would be to enable users to choose, say, five domains that don't count. But then clever users choose one web proxy site and get all their internet for free...

Re: Wikipedia’s ‘complicated’ relationship with net neutrality

#60

Post by sparkzilla »

Golf_Hotel_Mike wrote: post #55
sparkzilla wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, Because it closes out competition to newer, better information.

>No, Because it closes out competition to newer, better information. But that would only make sense if Wikipedia created some sort of insurmountable barrier for newer, better information. It doesn't. Newer, better information can reach people through Wikipedia with just as much ease (provided it fits Wiki's publishing standards) as it would through any other platform. For all intents and purposes, Wikipedia and other…

Wikipedia creates an enormous barrier to better information due to its size and scope, and its co-dependent relationship with Google.

In many cases Wikipedia's information is substandard when compared to other sources, both in presentation and content. The wiki layout is useless for certain content types, such as video.

For example, many people prefer to use imdb for movie information (which is also free to the end user), but it comes lower than Wikipedia on many search results. There have also been several recent studies that say Wikipedia's medical information is unreliable and dangerous.

So giving free access to Wikipedia, over other sites is not actually in the public good at all. The answer is more competition.

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