
Wikipedia’s ‘complicated’ relationship with net neutrality - davmre
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/11/25/wikipedias-complicated-relationship-with-net-neutrality/
======
snowwrestler
Wikipedians take it on faith that their website is better, more useful, more
ethical, more informative, etc., than other websites. Thus they are able to
believe that it is right that their website should receive special (non-
neutral) treatment from ISPs.

The problem is, most website operators feel this way. I'm sure Google's
executives believe that everyone would be better off if they had more access
to Google; and Facebook folks think that about Facebook; Apple folks about
iCloud; etc.

So, this is not actually a consistent framework for how ISPs should treat
traffic. What if some team develops a better source of information than
Wikipedia? They'll be hamstrung from the beginning because Wikipedia is "free"
and they are not.

It takes the decision-making out of the hands of the consumer, and puts it
into the hands of big ISPs and websites. Whether the website is run by a non-
profit or not doesn't matter much...either way it is like the foxes guarding
the hen house.

~~~
GabrielF00
> Wikipedians take it on faith that their website is better, more useful, more
> ethical, more informative, etc., than other websites.

I've been a Wikipedia editor for about 10 years. I don't think that your
perception of the community has any basis in reality. Lot's of Wikimedians are
pretty vocal about their disagreements with the Wikimedia Foundation on a wide
range of issues (including this one). There are lots of discussions within the
community about the limitations of Wikipedia's model.

~~~
woah
How do you feel about non-neutral treatment of Wikipedia traffic? Does this
differ from your feelings on non-neutral treatment of Netflix traffic?

~~~
GabrielF00
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.

~~~
solipsism
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 have something to say
about it as well. So might stackexchange.com.

~~~
GabrielF00
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.

------
philipn
This is an interesting topic, but kind of a weird article. Wikipedia wrote a
long article addressing the topic of Net Neutrality and Wikipedia Zero a few
months back. This is worth reading if you're interested in the topic:

[https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/08/01/wikipedia-zero-and-
net...](https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/08/01/wikipedia-zero-and-net-
neutrality-protecting-the-internet/)

Kind of odd that the Washington Post doesn't mention any of these points.
Personally, I still feel the Wikipedia Zero program violates net neutrality,
but mentioning Wikipedia's self-imposed constraints here seems important.

~~~
guelo
Good point. Here are the constraints:

> No exchange of payment. The Wikimedia Foundation does not pay carriers to
> zero-rate access to the Wikimedia sites and does not receive payments from
> carriers through Wikipedia Zero.

> Wikipedia Zero cannot be sold as part of a bundle. Access to the Wikimedia
> sites through Wikipedia Zero cannot be sold through limited service bundles.

> No exclusive rights. We try to partner with as many carriers as possible to
> maximize the number of users that can benefit from the initiative.

> Open to collaborating with other public interest sites. Our main goal is to
> promote free access to knowledge and we want to help other similar services
> interested in doing the same.

------
mrbabbage
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 Netflix). I'm
hesitant to strongly support most mainstream net neutrality proposals because
of situations like this, where network discrimination is net positive.

Anyway, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts.

~~~
SomeCallMeTim
To me, the thing that I don't want to see is some web sites being throttled
(or blocked!) on broadband.

Considering most (wired) broadband is bandwidth-limited at this point, varying
that bandwidth limit based on what site I'm talking with just feels wrong, and
I'd love to see the practice banned, because as you mention, a lot of users
have no choice in what broadband they can subscribe to.

Wireless broadband is almost all capped in the quantity that you can use,
however, and the T-Mobile "free streaming" options mentioned give you
something extra for "free." This is in stark contrast to blocking/limiting
something you're paying for, and I would be fine with this limited exception
in the wireless space.

But what I _would_ like to see, since this is effectively a utility, is for
that "free streaming" to be available on an equal opportunity basis: And
T-Mobile _seems_ to be doing exactly that by allowing customers to vote on
what services to include.

What feels like unfair competition is (as you mention) Comcast shaking down
its competition by way of not providing customers equal access. And until that
last-mile competition problem has been otherwise resolved (Google Fiber
everywhere?), I think we do need those regulations to prevent monopolistic
behaviors.

~~~
lavamantis
The T-Mobile deal seems great at first blush. You get more stuff for free -
yay! But, what if you're a startup streaming music service, and T-Mobile does
NOT include you in their list of cap-free streaming? Good luck competing with
the other providers.

Perhaps a solution would be to classify types of services, and then make ANY
company in that service eligible for the cap-free streaming. So, if you're a
startup in the music streaming space, you are automatically included along
with all the others. Then the telcos could provide packages of free services
without harming innovation and competition.

~~~
SomeCallMeTim
I get that. But streaming for free over mobile is _far_ from the only way to
compete.

T-Mobile is the _third-largest_ carrier in the US. Probably a small minority
of T-Mobile users even _know about_ the free streaming feature. If your
business plan requires that tiny market segment to bootstrap you, then you
need a new business plan.

I just don't see it as a big enough differentiator to kill a new service, even
if other carriers started doing something similar to T-Mobile.

A new streaming service doesn't need to rely on free mobile streaming _at all_
to bootstrap; if its focus _were_ mobile streaming, a better answer could be
to pre-cache hours worth of streams when on wifi. I end up in dead areas
frequently, and I end up in roaming areas where T-Mobile won't give me data
_at all_. I'd _love_ a service that would auto-cache exactly the music I like
to listen to so I could play it when roaming.

I've heard Spotify CAN cache, but it's too expensive for my tastes. Something
like a cacheable Pandora would be nice.

But my point is that while yes, it grants an edge to certain established
businesses, it's not an insurmountable barrier. Not like Comcast _throttling_
Netflix; if you can't use the service in its primary form, it's DOA. And
T-Mobile seems to be adding new services pretty quickly: Even indie stations
like Radio Paradise are on the list.

------
pasta_2
Net Neutrality is really a fight between two industries about shifting their
costs onto one another, with really good PR from the tech industry that has
enlisted normal people onto their side.

T-Mobile's zero-rating of data from certain music services supposedly violates
"net neutrality", but customers like it and it allows them to compete with ATT
and Verizon. It may be unfair to some other music service start up, but who
cares? It's unfair in the same way that an incumbent has more resources to
advertise their product than a start up.

~~~
hga
There are generally 4 economic players at minimum:

    
    
      Network service like Netflix.
      Their ISP, like L3.
      Consumer's ISP, like Comcast (also a Netflix competitor).
      Consumer.
    

The end points are paying money to the ISPs in the middle.

~~~
mlinksva
There's also content providers, content owners, or other ugly term. They
aren't participating in network traffic, but deeply shape structure and
demands of at least network services and consumers above, consumer ISP in some
cases.

------
guelo
This is a bullshit stance by Wikipedia. If when Wikipedia started there had
been some popular ad supported encyclopedia that received preferential ISP
treatment Wikipedia would not exist today.

Maybe it makes sense for the established internet companies to oppose net
neutrality because they're the ones that would get packaged up by the ISPs.
But it's bad for everyone else.

~~~
pulgrot
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?

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

~~~
Golf_Hotel_Mike
>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.

~~~
sparkzilla
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.

~~~
vacri
IMDB does have better quality information about their niche topic, but their
layout sucks. Outside their niche topic, their information sucks. Trying to
get even basic information about animals, major religions, or non-entertainer
public figures, and IMDB is just plain awful.

As for video, both IMDB and wikipedia 'pop up' a box in which to play video,
independent of the parent page layout; they don't seem to differ in that
respect, and IMDB is a specialist site that's all about video.

 _There have also been several recent studies that say Wikipedia 's medical
information is unreliable and dangerous._

As opposed to...? Online medical literature in general is noted to suck, even
the specialist websites. Even paid professionals - my housemate returned from
the doctor two days ago after a norovirus scare... and the doctor claimed the
incubation period before symptoms was 2 weeks... when it's actually 1-2 days.

Anyway, Wikipedia is a generalist site - basically you're arguing that it's
not as good as specialist sites, so to free up access to information, all that
better info should be free, hence all (useful) sites (effectively) should be
free. I'm not sure that's going to go down well with ISPs.

~~~
DanBC
> As opposed to...? Online medical literature in general is noted to suck,
> even the specialist websites. Even paid professionals - my housemate
> returned from the doctor two days ago after a norovirus scare... and the
> doctor claimed the incubation period before symptoms was 2 weeks... when
> it's actually 1-2 days.

Now get some good quality evidence - something like a Cochrane review or NICE
guidance - and try to edit those medical pages.

------
kazinator
Net non-neutrality used to overcome severe data caps so some poor buggers can
browse the Wikipedia?

This really sounds like trying to add one wrong to another to try to make a
right.

This really confuses issues too; metered access to a network isn't quite the
same thing as non-neutral access where some content gets much better latency
and bandwidth.

Cutting off access to _all_ sources of content at a given data cap does in
fact meet the definition of neutral: No Netflix for you, and no Usenet, no
Skype, no IRC, no git, no ssh, ...

Data caps in fact hurt the high-bandwidth premium services that easily bust
data caps, whose purveyors support non-neutrality.

------
belorn
This seems very similar to the postal system when it give free-of-charge
service for humanitarian aid. It seems a very strict interpretation of the
common carrier principle to disallow it on the basis that its discriminating
against those who has to pay.

What is the threat model to net neutrality for cases when there is no exchange
of payments?

------
srinivasan
The authors didn't address the point that all the current use cases for zero
rating are on wireless, not on traditional broadband.

The Google-Verizon proposal from 2010 had this "wireless exclusion". I was
opposed to it in principle, but now as a T-mobile customer I really love the
fact that Spotify doesn't count to my usage limits. I can completely see how
zero rating could benefit the developing world and even the elderly in
developed countries - these demographics are very likely to own a cellphone
even though they might not use home broadband.

I don't see anything wrong in providing a throttled experience for free as
long as all paid traffic (including non-zero rated versions of Wikipedia that
include pictures/video) is treated equally.

~~~
r00fus
Wondering why you don't see an issue with zero-rating - it's essentially
making an unlevel playing field, with the big players like Facebook/Spotify
buying an anticompetitive moat against any new entrants.

I don't see how zero-rating is going to help network congestion either - won't
zero-rated Spotify for my neighbors causes my calls to drop or my maps to not
update?

Is zero-rating some bandwidth somehow magically evading Shannon's Law?

~~~
srinivasan
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](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?

\---

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.

~~~
r00fus
While I appreciate your thoughtful response, all of your points evade my
questions.

Especially your (iii) which makes a pretty invalid assumption about paid
traffic all paying the same rates. Do you know this is true for current paid
traffic? I would bet it's entirely not true. Even if it is, paid traffic being
prioritized over free traffic is essentially reinforcing the internet slow-
lane.

Nothing of what you said replies to the difficulties in competing against
Facebook or other internet giants when they're paying to prevent competition
from newcomers.

Sorry, but you sound like a telecom/cable apologist.

~~~
srinivasan
I didn't say anything that could be construed as an apologist argument for the
cable industry, or even the wireless industry. You can only accuse me of being
a T-mobile apologist - and what they are doing hugely benefits me, considering
my limited budget. And I'm not alone.

    
    
      Nothing of what you said replies to the difficulties in competing against Facebook or other internet giants when they're paying to prevent competition from newcomers.
    

1) I argued that zero-rating music services isn't as anti-competitive as it's
made it out to be. Since 27 services (many of which I hadn't heard of) made it
onto the list, it can't be _that_ hard for a newcomer to get onto the list.

2) Facebook Zero is a developing world issue. I said earlier that I don't have
the experience to comment on developing-world issues, but let me take a stab
at it now (this is sort of long): if you lived in a part of Africa that had no
electricity but had cellphone reception (this is quite common), there's a good
chance you would rather have Facebook and Wikipedia for free on your phone, as
opposed to having a level playing field among all services yet being able to
afford none of them. (<\-- TL;DR)

Of course Facebook isn't being purely benevolent in offering this for free -
they want to increase their MAUs and ad revenue, and get a hold on the market.
Which is why I said I don't necessarily agree with that they're doing. BUT,
you can see how the argument has its merits.

Yes, this makes it hard for another social network to gain usage share in that
market. Duh. It would be hard if you were a startup from SoMa, and it would be
equally hard (but much more soul-crushing) if you were a startup from the same
region and can't get what Facebook does from the local wireless carriers.

What do customers in such markets want? The bottom 90% of customers in such a
market will almost certainly want Facebook and Wikipedia for free.

3) As for congestion: I just wanted to pose the Spotify Premium vs Maps
question to you. No wireless company ever mentioned "reducing congestion" as
the reason for their zero-rating policies (it doesn't make sense anyway), so
the subject of congestion is out of place here, and your questions about
congestion are completely irrelevant here. That part of my response was very
poorly worded now that I read it.

    
    
      paid traffic being prioritized over free traffic is essentially reinforcing the internet slow-lane.
    

Not quite. The important difference is that it's paid for _by the consumer_ ,
not by the content provider. Even today, those who pay more for a better
internet package get their traffic prioritized over those who pay less and
everyone's fine with this. See, for example, Google Fiber's slower free tier
in Kansas City.

------
dragonwriter
This is kind of at the peripheries of net neutrality. I don't recall any
proposed "net neutrality" related regulations -- whether the 2010 Open
Internet Order, the NPRM from earlier this year, or any of the concrete
alternatives proposed -- that would have prohibited zero-rating on mobile
networks that have data volume charges.

This isn't even the same thing as paid prioritization (which the recent NPRM
may still have allowed, within some bounds), where edge providers are given a
choice to pay the ISP or have packets get lower delivery priority -- the
ability of the customer to connect and the quality of service provided on the
connection isn't affected by the payment, the customer gets exactly the
service they would get connecting to an edge provider that hadn't made a deal
with the access provider. The only difference is that the customer doesn't
have to pay for the data consumption (which essentially is equivalent to the
edge provider reimbursing the consumer for the data cost, except presumably
the costs are lower commensurate with the simplicity of a direct edge provider
to access provider payment route.)

So, while certainly this kind of thing might raise concerns related to net
neutrality, its not what the focus of the net neutrality debate and regulatory
effort has been.

~~~
chimeracoder
> So, while certainly this kind of thing might raise concerns related to net
> neutrality, its not what the focus of the net neutrality debate and
> regulatory effort has been.

Well, that's because this wasn't a threat (in the US) until relatively
recently, unlike paid prioritization and/or throttling. That doesn't mean that
zero-rating doesn't violate the same principles as paid prioritization does.
If you take a look at the doomsday scenario that Fred Wilson outlines in "VC
Pitches In A Year Or Two"[0], the situation could just as easily apply to a
zero-rated world.

You can think of zero-rating as "slow lanes", the speed on the slow lane is
set to zero. (In a way, zero-rating is actually worse than paid
prioritization, because it achieves the same end result, but placing a more
consumer-friendly facade on the same rotten interior.)

> This is kind of at the peripheries of net neutrality. I don't recall any
> proposed "net neutrality" related regulations -- whether the 2010 Open
> Internet Order, the NPRM from earlier this year, or any of the concrete
> alternatives proposed -- that would have prohibited zero-rating on mobile
> networks that have data volume charges.

I also don't recall any _large-scale_ [1] efforts to impose zero-rating on
mobile consumers until the last year or so, which is why net neutrality
legislation hasn't focused on it. In general, legislation around consumer
protections tends to be reactive rather than proactive, and net neutrality has
definitely followed this pattern.

[0] [http://avc.com/2014/01/vc-pitches-in-a-year-or-
two/](http://avc.com/2014/01/vc-pitches-in-a-year-or-two/)

[1] (Yes, they existed in some cases, but they were very limited and
relatively obscure.)

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

~~~
amalcon
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 is why nobody actually used their mobile data
capability).

~~~
skuhn
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.

~~~
daveloyall
You comment is informative but it contains a magnitude error. It should be
2.47gbit, not 2.47tbit.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=1+kibibit+per+second+*+30+da...](https://www.google.com/search?q=1+kibibit+per+second+*+30+days+in+gibibits)

~~~
skuhn
You're right. 1kbit/s over a month would result in 2.47gbit of data
transferred, which is a bit less damning. To get to 2.47tbit, you would of
course need 1mbit/s transferred (which is still not that much!).

However flawed my example, I think my point remains valid: data usage measured
over arbitrary time periods makes no sense when the underlying infrastructure
is built with blocks that only care about instantaneous transfer rates.

~~~
daveloyall
I agree.

------
_greim_
If your meritocracy is just a snapshot of whoever's best at a specific time,
then you don't have a meritocracy. In other words, what happens when a new,
better source of information comes online?

------
dlitz
Wikipedia Zero creates a financial penalty for users who want to preserve
their privacy by using Wikipedia over Tor. I wonder what folks here think
about the ethics of that.

------
yzzxy
Serious question, as I don't really have a strong opinion on zero rating
either way:

In a scenario where zero-rating is available to all actors at equivalent
prices, is there still a problem? It would raise the barrier to entry for
internet companies perhaps, but probably not by too much. I guess you could
argue it encourages bandwidth capping?

I'd like to hear arguments from both sides.

~~~
cegev
>In a scenario where zero-rating is available to all actors at equivalent
prices, is there still a problem? It would raise the barrier to entry for
internet companies perhaps, but probably not by too much. I guess you could
argue it encourages bandwidth capping?

An alternative, would be to allow zero-rating through free prioritization.
Give either web services or consumers the choice of "this is an important
connection: per-byte-rate and give higher priority," or "this isn't so
important: zero-rate and give lower priority."

That way VoIP and other latency/rate-critical services could operate more
reliably, while BitTorrent, home cloud storage and others could operate
without congesting the network and without data cap problems. If this choice
was allowed in an automated way, it would not seem to cause any unfairness, or
keep smaller/newer players off the market.

------
gioele
For those who think Wikipedia is right in defending Wikipedia Zero, could you
please elaborate on how this will not impact the adoption of any alternative
encyclopaedic website?

~~~
err4nt
Can you fork Wikipedia? I remember back in the day it was all open licensed
and downloadable, but it's grown quite a bit since then.

------
legohead
This isn't a dilemma. You can have net neutrality and also have Wikipedia Zero
-- it isn't mutually exclusive. It might make it a little harder and Wikipedia
may need to ask for more donations, but this is __their __goal, not anyone
else 's. Wikipedia isn't the internet.

------
pmontra
A better solution: no data caps, even if it has to be enforced by regulations.

~~~
rmc
But bandwidth is a limited medium. It is fair IMO that those who use it a lot
should pay more,

~~~
pmontra
Which doesn't mean having a data cap. It could be 1$ per GB on wireless
devices (where bandwidth is really limited because of collisions with
everybody's else traffic) or whatever amount it makes sense. Wikipedia pages
are quite skinny.

Servers usually pay per GB with many VPS providers right now, with a monthly
quota included in the base fee. If you have your own datacenter you pay per GB
in other ways.

That said, subsidising the access to one own website could be seen as a fair
commercial practice or anticompetitive behavior. It depends on so many factors
that I don't even want to get into it.

------
stefantalpalaru
There's a better solution than zero rating on mobile plans: a very low
bandwidth (4-8 KiB/s) unlimited connection once the full speed limit is
reached. TIM does this in Italy and it doesn't care what sites you access in
this low bandwidth regime.

~~~
rakoo
The thing is that zero rating can be promoted by platforms such as Wikipedia
and Facebook, who want to promote net neutrality; unlimited low speed
connection is an ISP-only thing, and I haven't seen many big ISPs (really)
promote net neutrality.

