
The slow demise of Wikipedia Zero on the subcontinent - atTheBank
https://thewire.in/125172/nepals-ncell-shuts-access-wikipedia-zero/
======
BearGoesChirp
I once had a chat with a guy who grew up in a similar place with no internet.
He mentioned that given the choice between no internet and a corporate curated
internet, he would have wanted the latter.

Having thought on it more, I ended up drawing a comparison to child labor. We
can agree that child labor (as in the 7 days a week, 12 hours a day variant)
is all sorts of bad, including limiting a child's ability to get an education.
But I remember reading in the past that bans on child labor have often times
ended up with children turning to even more harmful means to survive or not
surviving at all.

Is defending net neutrality in all cases worth the immediate short term costs?
Should we even be the ones to make that decision? Or are some exceptions
reasonable, such as non-profits? Other comments here have already pointed out
different ways these exceptions could be abused, but how does the damage of
that abuse equate to someone who was depending upon Wikipedia Zero to gain
knowledge who is now cut off?

I'm really not sure.

~~~
intended
Maybe I am really old, or maybe there’s been some huge change while I was
asleep and the internet became Wikipedia. Let me see if that’s the case.

Wikipedia is an amazing, near magical confluence of the best of human
intentions. For no reason, other than to share and inform people collected,
annotated and curated as much human knowledge as they could and placed it on a
single website. This was done without a central core, almost entirely self
organized. The rules were simple – anyone can edit any page. That’s it. People
power did the rest.

The part that _should_ amaze you isn’t the collection of information, as
amazing as it is.

What should amaze you is that all it took to create something that massive and
that unimagined is the ability of anyone anywhere, to create something that
grew into Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is not the internet. The internet is not a dictionary, or an
encyclopedia, or facebook, google, amazon, ebay, or youtube or Netflix.

Those are just sites and servers. A network anyone can connect to. _That
together_ is the internet.

And that’s what you are sacrificing by adding middle men. That’s what the NN
debate is about. Inserting middle men, into the system.

There should be no doubt, in anyone’s mind, that NN is more valuable than
Wikipedia, and likely more valuable than the entire internet as it stands
today. If all the sites were wiped out, and we had to recover – you wouldn’t
succeed with middle men in the way.

NN is what allows that random someone, to connect to Wikipedia in Hindi, and
muck it up, and thus learn how to correct their mistake. And then to make
another website, and put it up for her/his friends to see. There is a massive
set of websites still to come, entire language groups underserved today, and
entirely new systems and devices yet to be invented to help people come
online. To your friend, I’d point out that its not the Wikipedia of today that
matters. It’s the new and unexpected that he will add to the internet of
tomorrow, that matters. NN is the rule that keeps the middle man out of the
way. Sacrificing that for Wikipedia is to declare you have no faith in a
better future

~~~
BearGoesChirp
>And that’s what you are sacrificing by adding middle men. That’s what the NN
debate is about. Inserting middle men, into the system.

This makes sense, if you are talking about someone who already has some level
of internet access. But consider the person who doesn't. Either they can get
internet from a middle man, or they can't get internet. To that person,
Wikipedia using a middle man is definitely more valuable than NN.

Perhaps if NN is so valuable that we should protect it, then we should protect
it by competing and offering a free internet with no middle man instead of
using government regulation to ban the middle man. Offer the end user a better
choice. If it isn't worth the price it would cost us to do it... then NN might
not be that valuable.

~~~
intended
I'm surprised you focused only on that point and followed it up with
"Wikipedia with middle men is more valuable than NN"

My whole point is that the internet is much, much more than Wikipedia.

Giving that up is simply a bad choice.

\----

As for your point on govt regulation. -

Telecom is a textbook example of an industry which has barriers to entry and a
tendency towards monopoly. You have to have regulation to compensate for the
inherent structural issues of the market.

Secondly there are free versions of the net being offered and discussed,
Mozilla has one, which conform to NN.

But The middle men still want NN broken so that they can seek rents.

This results in the old cable tv model, which is exactly the kind of poor
system the internet iterates over.

I keep being surprised by how people bring these incorrect and inappropriate
analogies to this discussion (free market, choice).

I feel now, that it's free market-ism which causes this problem - a belief
that by allowing the market and firms to figure it out, there will be some
better outcome.

Which is so odd to hear from Americans given The history of every telecom
auction, the promised roll out of fiber, the tax breaks and many more.

------
JumpCrisscross
> _There is a fundamental difference between a not-for-profit
> organisation...vs a for profit corporation_

I'd like to petition my not-for-profit political action committee be zero
rated on the Indian subcontinent. Less ridiculously, we have "alt fact"
encyclopedias like the "Conservapedia" [1]. Should that be zero rated?

[1]
[http://www.conservapedia.com/Main%5FPage](http://www.conservapedia.com/Main%5FPage)

------
cakeface
I feel like this is a slippery slope. As with all neutrality, net neutrality
means that for good or bad you can't prefer some traffic. Any zero-rated
service is not neutral. You can't block Facebook from being zero rated but
allow Wikipedia.

~~~
belorn
Wikipedia is a non-profit and is thus distinctly different from Facebook. Non-
profit organization enjoy many benefits like better taxes, but it's not seen
as a slippery slope risk. The distinct line between for-profit and non-profit
allows for some inequalities between organizations.

You can give tax exemptions to Wikipedia but not Facebook. Why then not also
zero rate Wikipedia but not Facebook?

~~~
dingaling
> Wikipedia is a non-profit and is thus distinctly different from Facebook.

At an operational level they're not much different; both rely on generation of
revenue to cover costs and to compensate their permanent staff, and both can
make profits which can be reinvested in the organisation or distributed as
dividends or spent on 'stuff'.

Essentially the only operational difference is that all of the non-profit's
untaxed profits must originate from activities aligned with their primary
stated function, whereas Facebook is free to earn from other unrelated
business activities.

Furthermore the officers of a non-profit can't dip into the profits for self-
enrichment since the profits belong to the organisation ( hence untaxed ), but
since they extract their remuneration upstream of the profits that's not a
major issue.

------
itchyjunk
To point out some thing, internet (and lot of telecom) is mostly limited to
the cities, mainly the capital Kathmandu.

Secondly, there are fibers going through different parts of the country [0]
but the country itself doesn't have much access to it. (Don't ask me, some
politics are beyond me.Something to do with India and China both wanting to be
the one influencing the region).

Third, Nepal Telecom used to be run by the Nepal government so they inherited
all the legacy hardwares but hasn't upgraded it too much. Ncell owns a lot of
the cellular infrastructure.[1] They probably feel like their customers can
afford this data or they want other companies to bare the costs (im guessing).
The article points to information from this other site [2] which seems
inaccurate. For example, world link [3] is one of the better internet service
provider and one of the first to provide cable internet. (I use to have a
blazing 64kbps adsl unlimited line that worked from 9 pm to 6 am. Ah, good
days). worldlink used to even have a server for youtube and some other google
stuff. But I guess wikipedia was trying to make the data free for mobile i'm
guessing?

tl;dr I don't blame Ncell if its only on them to provide free service.

\-------------

[0]
[http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/busin...](http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/business/china-
links-nepal-with-optical-fibre-to-end-india-
dependence/articleshow/52706038.cms)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ncell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ncell)

[2] [http://www.ktm2day.com/2015/02/20/internet-access-reaches-
to...](http://www.ktm2day.com/2015/02/20/internet-access-reaches-to-one-third-
population-in-nepal/)

[3] [https://www.worldlink.com.np/](https://www.worldlink.com.np/)

------
drzaiusapelord
The downside of net neutrality I guess. You can't do something 'nice' as it
violates the regulation, but ultimately if we let 'nice' things slide
constantly then NN would just die out. Everyone would find an excuse for their
own 'niceness.' T-mobile's music streaming exception is the most obvious one
in the states.

I don't see why non-profit status would be an exception. I can start a non-
profit version of my service and still pay myself a handsome salary, perhaps
more due to all the money saved by being a zero service. Facebook can just
spin off a Facebook Foundation or somesuch and get around these rules. The
abuse would be endless.

------
sasaram
The wire.in is a dangerous website which consistently promotes companies and
policies from other countries without understanding the nuance of the
subcontinent. It is high time, media magazines write down detailed information
about the executives of such organization, how they (capital fund and revenue
source of the organization) make money and why their articles will have a bias
or not.

~~~
baq
if you are a human, you are biased full stop.

why you consider a news site dangerous is beyond me. consider this: in the
west, saying that a news site is dangerous is dangerous.

~~~
johansch
In this part of Asia, "dangerous" is code for "troublemaker", i.e. anyone who
tries to challenge the state-sanctioned message. I think it's a sino-ism.

------
jmcdiesel
Misleading title, access has not been shut off at all.

What has changed, is a provider decided not to participate in giving away
their services for free, which they should be free to do. FUD

Now we're feeling entitled to have someone deliver wireless content for free,
or we throw a fit?

------
Datsundere
Nepal likes to follow what India tells them to do. I'm not surprised. But
there is nepal telecom which hopefully has still kept it free? Ncell is
generally considered bad because they charge extra cost and has bad network.

------
johansch
Some background:

Ncell is the company that was created by Swedish/Finnish telecom company
TeliaSonera. They made a lot of PR buzz about bringing connectivity to
Himalaya etc.

They exited Tibet last year and sold the subsidiary to a Malaysian company.

~~~
laex
> They exited Tibet last year and sold the subsidiary to a Malaysian company.

I believe they exited Nepal, not Tibet.

------
snowpanda
They didn't shut access, it says you can still access it but you have to pay.

Obviously still really bad, but the title isn't correct.

~~~
sp332
Wikipedia Zero is the free service which was shut down.

~~~
tomku
There is no service that was shut down, the telecom company in question is now
charging for traffic going to Wikimedia Foundation domains where before they
did not.

Edit to clarify: "Wikipedia Zero" is an initiative by the WMF to get telecom
providers to allow their customers to access WMF projects without incurring
data usage fees. If your telecom provider participates, you don't have to do
anything special or different to access "free Wikipedia", you just go to the
normal mobile Wikipedia page and you don't get charged for the data.

