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posted by janrinok on Thursday November 27 2014, @05:50PM   Printer-friendly
from the have-the-cake-and-eat-it dept.

Brian Fung writes in the Washington Post that Wikipedia has been a little hesitant to weigh in on net neutrality, the idea that all Web traffic should be treated equally by Internet service providers such as Comcast or Time Warner Cable. That's because the folks behind Wikipedia actually see a non-neutral Internet as one way to spread information cheaply to users in developing countries. With Wikipedia Zero, users in places like Pakistan and Malaysia can browse the site without it counting it counting against the data caps on their cellphones or tablets. This preferential treatment for Wikipedia's site helps those who can't afford to pay for pricey data — but it sets the precedent for deals that cut against the net neutrality principle. "We believe in net neutrality in America," says Gayle Karen Young adding that Wikipedia Zero requires a different perspective elsewhere. "Partnering with telecom companies in the near term, it blurs the net neutrality line in those areas. It fulfils our overall mission, though, which is providing free knowledge."

Facebook and Google also operate programs internationally that are exempted from users' data caps — a tactic known somewhat cryptically as "zero rating". Facebook in particular has made “Facebook Zero” not just a sales pitch in developing markets but also part of an Internet.org initiative to expand access “to the two thirds of the world’s population that doesn’t have it.” But a surprising decision in Chile shows what happens when policies of neutrality are applied without nuance. Chile recently put an end to the practice, widespread in developing countries, of big companies “zero-rating” access to their services. "That might seem perverse," says Glyn Moody, "since it means that Chilean mobile users must now pay to access those services, but it is nonetheless exactly what governments that have mandated net neutrality need to do."

 
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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 27 2014, @07:48PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 27 2014, @07:48PM (#120668)

    I don't think you get how "zero-rating" works - the costs are still paid for directly, they aren't buried in higher rates for all other services. Facebook pays for the bandwidth that Facebook-Zero users consume (and if you look at the facebook-zero service, it is a massively stripped down low-bandwidth version of facebook precisely because facebook is footing the bill). Same thing with wikipedia - the wikipedia foundation pays for every one of those bits. It isn't re-apportioned to higher pricing for normal bandwidth.

    You might be confusing it with something like T-mobile's 'free' music streaming [eweek.com] where streaming music from certain designated sites is not charged against a user's bandwidth allotment. T-mobile does not charge those sites either, they just average the cost into the base price for their smartphone plans.

    Both are problematic in the long run, but their mechanisms are significantly different.

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