The Wikipedia Zero program will end in 2018
blog.wikimedia.org
blog.wikimedia.org
Zero-rating's relationship with the broader subject of net neutrality has been hotly debated, and some legislation considers it a violation of net neutrality, while others don't. Nonetheless, fierce backlash against Facebook's zero-rating scheme in India was contrasted with Wikipedia's zero-rating which was broadly popular, exposing a dilemma.
By Wikimedia discontinuing this scheme, the situation moves towards resolution: no longer does it need to be debated whether Wikipedia's zero-rating is a net good, but Facebook's, although ostensibly also for public benefit, is something to be avoided.
Without descending into hyperbloics: why?
If people want to use Facebook then why shouldn't they have the choice of doing so without additional cost?
Many mobile providers zero-rate music streaming such as Spotify. Is that bad too?
The logic being, if you want to start a Spotify competitor, you’re now competing with a solution that has free data baked in. Even if your service is good, Spotify will be much cheaper.
My position is a bit more nuanced than that but I’m weary of being blanket downvoted and derided for not just accepting net neutrality as our lord and savior so I’ll stop here...
But it's nothing new, my views are just centered around focusing on competition. I don't agree that bits are "just bits" anymore.
If we all used internet to read HTML-only websites I'm sure ISPs could guarantee faster speeds and actually keep the guarantees for much less than they do now. Realistically it takes more infrastructure to provide certain types of content at scale and I respect the ISPs rights to reflect that in their pricing.
People don't seem to get how Zero rating can benefits consumers without increasing the price of other data. They assume "If Spotify is free, they must be baking the cost into non-Spotify data". Which is not true. People just won't use data if most of their uses of data immediately blow up their data usage (remember back when Internet on phones was measured in KB? Some phones started coming out with J2ME apps for streaming video, but who would be foolhardy enough to use them when you were being charged several cents a minute?). Zero rating lets ISPs allow usages that would otherwise turn people away from data completely, while still charging from uses that are incidental. You'll be more likely to use your phone's data if you also have it on while in the car to stream music, the sum for the ISP is less money per MB on average, but more MBs in total.
And of course we all act like not having blanket net neutrality laws prevents the FCC from acting in outlying cases. I'm all for targeted FCC intervention, we've seen it work in the past, I don't know why it'd stop working.
The campaign for net neutrality has also become centered on half-truths and complete embellishments that take advantage of the average person's lack of technical knowledge which doesn't sit well with me. Technically I guess that's neither here nor there, but us "techies" only get the soapbox every once in a while, if we waste it on claiming false doomsdays like "You'll have to pay to watch porns and read Reddit!!!!!" and it doesn't come to fruition, next time something serious comes up the response will be "well last time nothing really happened did it?".
Or is the complaint I don't fit in with your echo chamber?
If there is spare capacity in the network, why not simply increase data caps.
I’m actually not sure where I imply they have spare capacity, but if you mean in reference to the zero-rating hypothetical (ie. they have spare capacity if they use zero rating to fill it) the idea is the data usage of the services is several orders of magnitude above what normal data usage is, and with zero rating there’s often a trade off, like reduced resolution on video. They could decrease the price of the data, but not enough to make the full quality usages economical for most people.
> They assume "If Spotify is free, they must be baking the cost into non-Spotify data". Which is not true.
So, how is that data paid for then? Or are you saying that there are no costs associated with providing that service? Does it not cost anything to operate the cell towers that transmit the spotify data?
> Zero rating lets ISPs allow usages that would otherwise turn people away from data completely,
So, let's compare two scenarios that only differ in whether there is zero rating involved:
1. The customer has a data cap of 100 GB for n $/month.
2. The customer has a data cap of 10 GB plus an average (across customers, not enforced for individual customers) 90 GB of bandwidth that is limited to specific services for n $/month.
What advantages/additional usages does the limitation to specific services in the latter case allow that the former does not?
> People just won't use data if most of their uses of data immediately blow up their data usage (remember back when Internet on phones was measured in KB? Some phones started coming out with J2ME apps for streaming video, but who would be foolhardy enough to use them when you were being charged several cents a minute?).
I understand this to mean roughly "if people have a 10 GB data cap, they will be discouraged from using it for streaming video"--what did I miss?
> while still charging from uses that are incidental. You'll be more likely to use your phone's data if you also have it on while in the car to stream music, the sum for the ISP is less money per MB on average, but more MBs in total.
Which I understand to mean "with zero rating with a large total bandwidth allocation (data cap and zero rating bandwidth combined), people are going to use more bandwidth at the same price"--what did I miss here?
Really, I am sorry if I misunderstood you, but even on rereading it carefully, I don't see how I failed to address any of the context.
> If we all used internet to read HTML-only websites I'm sure ISPs could guarantee faster speeds and actually keep the guarantees for much less than they do now. Realistically it takes more infrastructure to provide certain types of content at scale and I respect the ISPs rights to reflect that in their pricing.
And to explicitly ddress this as well: That is true in one sense, but only relevant to the question of zero rating in a different sense in which it is not true.
Yes, a minute of video takes much more bandwidth to transfer than a minute of text to read, in that sense, that's true, but that's not relevant to the discussion at hand.
Transporting 1 GB of HTML, however, takes exactly as much infrastructure as transporting 1 GB of video. Which is why it's a net neutrality violation to distinguish between them.
Let me just spell out what's wrong with your original comment then:
>>You are committing so obvious fallacies it's just not really believable that you aren't aware.
Great start. Really, I wish the internet had never learned the word "fallacy" to insert it at the drop of a hat
--
>> They assume "If Spotify is free, they must be baking the cost into non-Spotify data". Which is not true.
>>So, how is that data paid for then? Or are you saying that there are no costs associated with providing that service? Does it not cost anything to operate the cell towers that transmit the spotify data?
Well if you kept reading I spell that out:
Zero rating lets ISPs allow usages that would otherwise turn people away from data completely, while still charging from uses that are incidental. You'll be more likely to use your phone's data if you also have it on while in the car to stream music, the sum for the ISP is less money per MB on average, but more MBs in total.
Again. The sum for the ISP is less money per MB on average, but more MBs in total.
--
>> Zero rating lets ISPs allow usages that would otherwise turn people away >>from data completely,
>>So, let's compare two scenarios that only differ in whether there is zero >>rating involved:
>>1. The customer has a data cap of 100 GB for n $/month.
>>2. The customer has a data cap of 10 GB plus an average (across customers, not enforced for individual customers) 90 GB of bandwidth that is limited to specific services for n $/month.
What advantages/additional usages does the limitation to specific services in the latter case allow that the former does not?
Now you also need to also actually know how zero rating is being used, they give you unlimited to those services, but they're allowed to limit the quality of service. They're allowed to form partnerships with the zero rated services. They're allowed to use their own services. These are all factors that add up to either saving cost or generating additional revenue over normal data usage.
I take it that a person genuinely interested in net neutrality understands some context of it's real world effects so I didn't think I'd have to spell that about but apparently not.
--
And I'll mention the one part of your second comment that isn't just restating your first comment:
>>Yes, a minute of video takes much more bandwidth to transfer than a minute of text to read, in that sense, that's true, but that's not relevant to the discussion at hand.
It's not relevant because it doesn't support your point of view...
The peak bandwidth and total bandwidth needed to let people consume the internet increases if the media the internet is composed of requires... more peak bandwidth and total bandwidth.
You could read 1990s style HTML and ultra compressed low res JPEG for a year and not use as much data as 4k Netflix does in an hour. That's extremely relevant when suddenly all your customers want to be able to do that.
> Zero rating lets ISPs allow usages that would otherwise turn people away from data completely, while still charging from uses that are incidental. You'll be more likely to use your phone's data if you also have it on while in the car to stream music, the sum for the ISP is less money per MB on average, but more MBs in total.
> Again. The sum for the ISP is less money per MB on average, but more MBs in total.
I still don't see how zero rating is required to enable that. How would the same amount of data, but as a data cap instead of zero rating, not enable the same use cases, and also lead to less money per MB on average, but more MBs total?
> Now you also need to also actually know how zero rating is being used, they give you unlimited to those services, but they're allowed to limit the quality of service. They're allowed to form partnerships with the zero rated services. They're allowed to use their own services. These are all factors that add up to either saving cost or generating additional revenue over normal data usage.
So ... how is zero rating required to enable lower quality services that conserve bandwidth? And if you limit the quality of some services, then transporting a gigabyte sent by that service saves costs vs. transporting a gigabyte from a different service?
> It's not relevant because it doesn't support your point of view...
No, it's not relevant because it does not support discrimination based on service, it only supports discrimination based on bandwidth used.
> The peak bandwidth and total bandwidth needed to let people consume the internet increases if the media the internet is composed of requires... more peak bandwidth and total bandwidth.
> You could read 1990s style HTML and ultra compressed low res JPEG for a year and not use as much data as 4k Netflix does in an hour. That's extremely relevant when suddenly all your customers want to be able to do that.
Really, I completely don't even understand what your point is. Yes, modern internet use cases require more bandwidth than in the old days, therefore, if you as an ISP want to enable people to make use of those, you have to somehow provide them with more bandwidth. So far, I understand and I agree. What I don't understand is how you manage to go from there to "... therefore, ISPs should be able to bill customers more per gigabyte of Debian ISOs than per gigabyte of low-quality youtube streams", or maybe even that that would be required to achieve that goal?! I mean, that is the conclusion that you are trying to support, isn't it?
None of your arguments seems to actually support zero rating (as opposed to any number of other measures that could be used to achieve the same purported goals).
Because now a potential Facebook competitor is now artificially on an uneven playing field because access to Facebook is free and access to the competitor costs mobile data (on top of naturally being on an uneven playing field because of network effects). It's short-term good for Facebook users, yes, but if you believe in competition / innovation, it has negative structural effects.
If accessing things without additional cost is good, people should have the choice of accessing everything without additional cost, not just Facebook and Wikipedia.
> Many mobile providers zero-rate music streaming such as Spotify. Is that bad too?
Yes. EFF has come out strongly against T-Mobile's "Binge On" program (see e.g. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/01/eff-confirms-t-mobiles... ), and that (plus the truly awful reaction of the T-Mobile CEO, who clearly doesn't realize that his customers include EFF members / supporters) is why I quit and moved to AT&T's prepaid plan, which as far as I know does not have the same scheme. AT&T does have a plan where any provider can sign up to pay for their customers' data use, which is different from waiving costs for certain large, established sites.
I think it's important to stick up for the sort of products you want to see in the world long-term, for prisoners'-dilemma reasons.
Wait, how is that different?
Zero-metering or other things being discussed privilege a fixed, arbitrary list of companies/websites, which is why they’re bad. Also, the extra cost is shouldered by either the ISP or the customer, which is like the company/website in question benefiting from a negative externality.
Binge On is video. The zero-rating program for music is Music Freedom.
If you are a Spotify competitor and want to get included in Music Freedom, you contact T-Mobile at the email address documented in the Music Freedom. You don't need any inside connections. T-Mobile's stated policy is to get as many music streaming services as possible covered.
For video providers who want to be included in Binge On, there is a different T-Mobile address to mail to, also documented on the T-Mobile site.
For Binge On, the video service can actually choose one of four ways to participate:
1. Do nothing. Their content will not be zero-rated. If a T-Mobile customer has enabled Binge On T-Mobile will try to optimize the bandwidth usage if it can detect the video.
2. Be zero-rated. T-Mobile detects and optimized bandwidth usage.
3. Be zero-rated. The video service detects when the customer is on T-Mobile and handle optimizing bandwidth.
4. Disallow Binge On. Their content will not be zero-rated, and T-Mobile will not try to optimize its bandwidth use for customers who have Binge On enabled.
Here are the technical details: https://www.t-mobile.com/content/dam/tmo/en-g/pdf/BingeOn-Vi...
4 weeks before I make any changes to any service I run via Stream On, I need to inform T-Mobile, and they have to approve the changes, or can end Stream On immediately.
All Stream On content needs to run via separate hostnames, and has to transmit the hostname in cleartext.
I have to be using forms of adaptive streaming, the bandwidth will be limited during this so that the user at most will be able to watch 480p videos.
50'000 EUR fine for each violation from my side, no fines if T-Mobile just kicks me out.
And so on and so on. It’s ridiculous.
Give me a single form where I enter a URL, and it’ll be zero-rated – or don’t zero-rate anything.
While that may be a stated policy, it is also obviously a lie.
Obviously, they only want specific kinds of services covered, or else they would just drop this crap in the first place, as that is the only and totally straightforward way to make sure that all services are covered.
If I run a bittorrent-based streaming service, they do not want to cover that. It's pure propaganda that they want to cover as many services as possible.
Let P(S,D) be the resources required to support that service. In general, for positive x, both of the following are true: (1) P(S+x,D) > P(S,D), and P(S,D+x) > P(S,D).
Let's say a particular ISP has everyone on a 40/10 plan, so they need P(40,10) resources.
Now suppose they decide to offer something like Music Freedom. A person streaming a 256 kbit/s stream 24/7 would use about 90 GB/month.
The resources required to support their customers are now approximately P(40,10) + P(1/4,90).
If instead they just raise the cap of everyone by 90, the resources required are P(40,100), which is about the same as P(40,10) + P(40,90) [1].
The general cap increase will use around P(40,90) - P(1/4,90) more resources than the Music Freedom approach.
In general, for a given total amount of data transferred per month, the more smoothly that data is spread throughout the month, the less resources are needed to handle it.
Music streaming is both smooth and does not require much speed, so doesn't require much additional resources. Streaming of video requires more, because it needs more speed, but it is still less than is required to support the same total amount of data as arbitrary files downloads, because arbitrary file downloads don't have a built in rate limit.
[1] Not quite. I don't think it is quite true that P(S,D1) + P(S,D2) = P(S,D1+D2). I think the combined will be little less than the sum of the parts. That's because the resources needed are a function of the average data used, the variation in that, and how often you can have slowdowns due to congestion without getting in trouble with regulators. So I think it is like adding distributions...the variation in the combined will be less than the sum of the variations in the individual distributions (I think...)
For one, internet service generally is and is accepted to be overbooked. Not to a degree that customers normally notice (well, it sometimes is, but that's not really acceptable), but there is no guarantee that the nominal bandwidth is available at all times to all customers, in particular on mobile networks. The burstiness of the traffic of individual users is not really a problem for network capacity planning, as a large enough collection of users will have a much smoother traffic pattern than any given individual. Yes, one user's file transfers throughout the day are very bursty. The combined file transfers of a few thousand users are not.
What remains is variation throughout the day--but that also affects streaming services. When noone is transferring files, noone is listening to or watching streams either. So with or without zero rating, you still have to build more infrastructure than if the same amount of data were being transferred completely smoothly throughout the month.
Also, if your goal were to smooth out traffic, certain file downloads should actually be treated preferentially--namely, file downloads scheduled for late at night. You should give people free podcatcher downloads at night, so people can download stuff to listen to during the day at night, when the network is otherwise idle, to shift load away from the day.
But what I think really makes this a bad argument is the fact that this argument in no way is specific to the approach of treating certain service (operators) preferentially. If your goal is to incentivise smooth bandwidth utilization, there is no need to therefore require specific streaming technologies and a contract between the service and the ISP and all that--all you need to do is to say that bandwidth use below 256 kbit/s (or whatever the appropriate bandwidth is) is not counted against the cap, that's it.
You simply put a price on the actual network load that you want to (dis-)incentivize and leave it to customers to decide how to make use of the resources you are selling them. There is no reason why spotify's 256 kbit/s needs to be treated differently than my own server's 256 kbit/s in order to price smoother network load cheaper than non-smooth load. If you want to make things more transparent for the customer, provide them with an app that shows them their current data rate, maybe with a switch that enables "safe mode" (i.e. limiting their data rate to what is not counted against the cap, maybe with some token bucket built in to not slow down occasional web page loads).
Or, for that matter, if they were actually serious about the smooth load thing, they could create an internet standard that smart phones (or any other devices) could implement that would allow them to mark flows that are to be subjected to low-bandwidth shaping. Then, apps could potentially just request a "cheap, low bandwidth socket", and the operating system could make sure that on any ISP that supports a category of slow, cheap bandwidth, that socket's data transfer would be zero-rated, without any need to sign contracts between service providers and (thousands of) ISPs, without any discrimination against small services or self-hosted stuff.
The collateral damage of the approaches that ISPs are taking is unnecessary for reaching those goals, and everything about how they do it tells you that that is fully intentional.
They hint that the global penetration of Wikipedia in the rest of the world is less one of connectivity and more one of local politics and interest in permitting and encouraging such an open tool.
It can't cost "that much" for someone to download Wikipedia pages. And if so, you can still buy a Wikipedia snapshot CD/DVD.
- But if Wikipedia is "too much" bandwidth (1) then what CAN you access on the internet? Why would you expect any utility from the internet at all, if a mostly text page is too much?
- Unlike Wikipedia taking on the world itself, Wikipedia should be LOBBYING people with even more money to do it for them. You know... building internet infrastructures. Think how bad our internet would be today if in 2005 they said, "Let's work on minimizing the bandwidth usage instead of complaining that our ISPs need to get faster." It's like someone who wants to get out of poverty by spending less. Yeah, that's great. But you want an easier way to get out of poverty? Make more money. Trust me, I know. We should be elevating internet quality (and incomes) around the world, not minimizing usage for one of the already tiniest bandwidth websites on the planet.
(1) BTW, there's also bandwidth reducing plugins for Chrome that have a 3rd-party convert them to black-and-white/low-res.
[edit] There's even an official Google plugin! (If you're okay having them basically store the contents every site you visit...)
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/data-saver/pfmgfdl...
I don't recall the 3rd party one I used but it definitely worked when I tested it out. It might be this one, Bandwidth Hero:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bandwidth-hero-liv...
(Basically search "Bandwidth saver" in extensions.)
Might wanna mail hn support?
No images or videos are loaded, however, you have to switch to "Data mode" and pay for those.
If I were to guess the stats: I would guess FB got 99% of the traffic, even though wikipedia was the key thing of the marketing message, at least in the west.
The basic FB setup was to target key people in african and south-east asian operators and after a while of the usual kind of negotiation say: if you'll set us up with this zero-rating program in your company, we'll get you a cushy FB job + visa to the US.
It was an open joke in the business at the time. People in every part of the industry (including myself!) were scrambling to get an FB job offer. These were the kind of things we were discussing after drinks when meeting with mobile operator customers.
It got to the point where operators were restricting the people who were allowed to meet with FB.
I am not joking. I witnessed (on FB!) several people from these mobile operators who I had previously worked with later move to California for FB jobs.
Yes, I am aware that this is likely illegal under US law. No, I don't have proof.
If you give people an artificially restricted free resource, they'll find a way to break out. If only there were a popular aphorism to explain this...
This fits with the observation that some of the most creative people I know are from Eastern Europe and former-Soviet countries. Restricting what people can do tends to, to put it bluntly, force them to think more. The darker side of this is that companies try very hard to make users think that they aren't restricted, just to stop them from "thinking too much" and thus getting out of the company's control.
A 20-year-old developer in Paraguay found a vulnerability in Facebook Messenger that allowed people to use Free Basics to tunnel through to the "real" internet
I predicted that would happen; but is that really a vulnerability or just the intrinsic way communication works? It's the digital analogy of asking someone to go to the library and read pages from a book to you, because you don't have access.
> Wikipedia Zero was created in 2012 to address one barrier to participating in Wikipedia globally: high mobile data costs. Through the program, we partnered with mobile operators to waive mobile data fees for their customers to freely access Wikipedia on mobile devices.
Net neutrality is a principle implemented through different laws in different countries. As such, this practice would depend on how the concept of net neutrality is implemented into local laws.
For example in Australia back when a 40GB monthly quota was the highest you could reasonably get data within most of Australia (actually a group of ISPs) was free and the quota only applied to international/outside bandwidth.
Wikipedia, by contrast with the WMF, has always had strong support for net neutrality. WMF's opposition to net neutrality was a strong indicator of its lack of accountability to the community it ostensibly serves.
> The Wikimedia Foundation believes that the principle of net neutrality is critical to the future of the open Internet. (https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/08/01/wikipedia-zero-and-net...)
In that article they also discuss how they reconcile net neutrality with Wikimedia Zero. From December 2017:
> Net neutrality is essential for access to knowledge (https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/12/04/net-neutrality-access-...)
Regarding Wikipedia strongly supporting net neutrality, I'm not sure I would agree considering it didn't participate in the day of action on December 12. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_of_Action_to_Save_Net_Neut...)
I think English Wikipedia didn't participate in the Day of Action because it's harder and harder to organize anything on WP, which of course is why WMF exists and why it isn't accountable to WP.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOPA_initiative
for example there is endless OS (https://endlessos.com/) which is essentially an offline linux distro aimed at school kids preloaded with a snapshot of wikipedia, khan academy, etc.