The slow demise of Wikipedia Zero on the subcontinent | Hacker News Reader

The slow demise of Wikipedia Zero on the subcontinent

thewire.in

46 pointsatTheBank30 comments

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.

Net neutrality is a good thing. Free access to information is a good thing. In rare cases, these two objectives collide.

Making a website free of charge would amount it to public infrastructure. I would understand it for governmental websites, but I feel it is a bit weird for foreign non-profits and would be even weirder for specific companies.

I think the slippery slope argument is good enough in that case. First Wikipedia will argue that it is an essential service, then Google, Facebook and Twitter will do the same and they can provide good arguments for that.

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

It can be used for file sharing too :)

http://www.techtimes.com/articles/144825/20160329/facebook-a...

>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.

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.

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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.

> 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

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.

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?

Because there are plenty of bad non-profits.

> 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.

I think it's just a precautionary step after the whole Facebook debacle, FB issues an email address to every user and they were tricking people into sending emails to petition for their service with a click and then sending a notification to all their friends when a person does that making it look like a good thing.

What made it even more iffy was that it would've been free on select few services and they planned to include a couple other companies later, it took a lot of convincing and explaining by a lot of concerned people. It was a scary time and no one wants to go through all of that again for whatever reason.

there aren't any true neutral services in the world as much as there aren't any truly neutral people. it's a matter of policy if encyclopedia access should be considered important enough to subsidize, and it's a matter of policy also if wikipedia should be considered an encyclopedia. (note that those two questions are orthogonal.)

i'd rather wikipedia was subsidized, because otherwise the people who benefit the most from it have relatively more expensive access to it than the rest.

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.

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[0] http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/busin...

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

[2] http://www.ktm2day.com/2015/02/20/internet-access-reaches-to...

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

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.

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.

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.

> why you consider a news site dangerous is beyond me

I consider Zero Hedge a "dangerous" website. That doesn't mean "dangerous" as in a physical or financial threat. It means "dangerous" as in after I read anything there, I expect to be--on average--less informed than when I entered.

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.

Thanks for explaining me there ! Do note I have focused on the news organization and not the article. This article is fine as a standalone. However, there is this eery consistency in the stand wire.in takes, on discussions. This I find dangerous for a press organization. Since it is not a news organization but a propaganda organization. When I think of a news organization, I expect good investigative journalism, many details which makes the reader informed to take decisions. This technically means wire.in is a lie for a news organization. I do like the comparison with zerohedge. There are many similarities, except zero hedge being bearish, grim and hateful is not hidden in its marketing.

I can confirm with proof that they spread incorrect information and will not fix it even if you bring it to their notice. i.e. Fake News propagator.

"dangerous website"

"promotes companies and policies from other countries"

Wow. Well... welcome to the internet?

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?

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.

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.

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

I believe they exited Nepal, not Tibet.

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.

Wikipedia Zero is the free service which was shut down.

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.

Also it's not that Nepal shut it down.

It's one of the telecom companies which was offering free access to Wikipedia and Twitter ended it citing low spending customers.

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