Mailing List Archive

Lord Voldemort wrote:
> Recently, legislation in the United States House of Representatives
> has been introduced that may have an impact on Wikimedia. The bills in
> question are H.R. 5252 and H.R. 5417, and can be seen in their
> entirety by searching for them on http://thomas.loc.gov/ . The
> aforementioned bills deal with "net neutrality", restricting phone and
> cable companies' ability to control aspects of the Internet and its
> distribution.
>
> As this may have a direct impact on Wikimedia Foundation, I was
> wondering if WMF had an official position on the matter. "Internet"
> companies such as Yahoo, Google, eBay, and others have made their
> official positions known, so I was wondering if WMF had discussed this
> issue. If I am just way behind the times, would someone mind
> directing me to the appropriate location? Thanks.

For those unfamiliar, the issue is that some telecommunications
companies have considered offering, for a fee, a service where operators
of internet services (like websites) can receive a guarantee of
higher-priority traffic. So if, say, CNN paid a telecomm company a
bunch of money, CNN's traffic would get a higher priority than other
traffic over that company's wires, and therefore CNN would appear to
users to be faster. There is some legislation proposed that would
prohibit that.

I personally don't think this is the sort of issue the Wikimedia
Foundation should be involved in--- It's a political and ethical
question that Wikimedians ought to be able to disagree on. The
competing interests are a desire to keep the internet relatively
egalitarian versus a desire not to unduly restrict private companies'
rights to engage in whatever sort of commerce they wish to engage in,
with the right balance depending partly on how much of a monopoly a
particular company has in its market. On the whole I would hope these
sorts of things don't become commonplace, but whether they ought to be
prohibited is a tougher issue, and one that I think is mostly depends on
non-Wikimedia-related political issues (like where you stand on
government regulation of utilities in general).

I think in the specific case of the Wikimedia Foundation, it'll have
negligible impact. We're large enough and have little enough
competition that the power balance tips more our way than their way---if
Wikipedia is slower on one ISP than on one of their competitors, that
will reflect badly on that ISP. And in any case, latency caused by
differential IP-traffic priority is likely to be negligible compared to
latency caused by things like hitting the database.

-Mark

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On 6/1/06, Delirium <delirium@hackish.org> wrote:
> I think in the specific case of the Wikimedia Foundation, it'll have
> negligible impact. We're large enough and have little enough
> competition that the power balance tips more our way than their way---if
> Wikipedia is slower on one ISP than on one of their competitors, that
> will reflect badly on that ISP. And in any case, latency caused by
> differential IP-traffic priority is likely to be negligible compared to
> latency caused by things like hitting the database.

We might care more if we were peering. Since we pay for all of our IP
traffic as transit, it's unlikely we'd run into this issue. The real
issue behind net neutrality is the desire of Tier 1 and Tier 2 ISPs to
give preference to customers who are buying transit (and who are thus
paying for bandwidth) over partners who are peering (and who thus do
not pay for bandwidth). Most large providers (such as Google) carry a
substantial portion of their traffic over peering relationships,
thereby avoiding traffic charges, and the beancounters at the Tier 1s
see this as lost revenue.

Kelly
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I agree that the Wikimedia Foundation can have no position on such an
issue. We are neutral, politically.

Individuals, though, can and do have positions of course. :)

Delirium wrote:
> Lord Voldemort wrote:
>> Recently, legislation in the United States House of Representatives
>> has been introduced that may have an impact on Wikimedia. The bills in
>> question are H.R. 5252 and H.R. 5417, and can be seen in their
>> entirety by searching for them on http://thomas.loc.gov/ . The
>> aforementioned bills deal with "net neutrality", restricting phone and
>> cable companies' ability to control aspects of the Internet and its
>> distribution.
>>
>> As this may have a direct impact on Wikimedia Foundation, I was
>> wondering if WMF had an official position on the matter. "Internet"
>> companies such as Yahoo, Google, eBay, and others have made their
>> official positions known, so I was wondering if WMF had discussed this
>> issue. If I am just way behind the times, would someone mind
>> directing me to the appropriate location? Thanks.
>
> For those unfamiliar, the issue is that some telecommunications
> companies have considered offering, for a fee, a service where operators
> of internet services (like websites) can receive a guarantee of
> higher-priority traffic. So if, say, CNN paid a telecomm company a
> bunch of money, CNN's traffic would get a higher priority than other
> traffic over that company's wires, and therefore CNN would appear to
> users to be faster. There is some legislation proposed that would
> prohibit that.
>
> I personally don't think this is the sort of issue the Wikimedia
> Foundation should be involved in--- It's a political and ethical
> question that Wikimedians ought to be able to disagree on. The
> competing interests are a desire to keep the internet relatively
> egalitarian versus a desire not to unduly restrict private companies'
> rights to engage in whatever sort of commerce they wish to engage in,
> with the right balance depending partly on how much of a monopoly a
> particular company has in its market. On the whole I would hope these
> sorts of things don't become commonplace, but whether they ought to be
> prohibited is a tougher issue, and one that I think is mostly depends on
> non-Wikimedia-related political issues (like where you stand on
> government regulation of utilities in general).
>
> I think in the specific case of the Wikimedia Foundation, it'll have
> negligible impact. We're large enough and have little enough
> competition that the power balance tips more our way than their way---if
> Wikipedia is slower on one ISP than on one of their competitors, that
> will reflect badly on that ISP. And in any case, latency caused by
> differential IP-traffic priority is likely to be negligible compared to
> latency caused by things like hitting the database.
>
> -Mark
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l@wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


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On 6/3/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales@wikia.com> wrote:
> I agree that the Wikimedia Foundation can have no position on such an
> issue. We are neutral, politically.

Well, the more recent of the bills, H.R.5417, is a bi-partisan bill.
So it's not 'really' that huge of a "political" issue. It's probably
more of a business (or government intervention into thereof) issue.
And I wasn't really looking for a "support" or "oppose" statement,
rather a statement that WMF was aware or discussed this and of any
possible impact, etc. But if what Delirium and Kelly say is correct
(that it won't have any effect), I guess it's understandable. Thanks.
--LV
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On Jun 3, 2006, at 7:16 PM, Lord Voldemort wrote:

> On 6/3/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales@wikia.com> wrote:
>> I agree that the Wikimedia Foundation can have no position on such an
>> issue. We are neutral, politically.
>
> Well, the more recent of the bills, H.R.5417, is a bi-partisan bill.
> So it's not 'really' that huge of a "political" issue. It's probably
> more of a business (or government intervention into thereof) issue.
> And I wasn't really looking for a "support" or "oppose" statement,
> rather a statement that WMF was aware or discussed this and of any
> possible impact, etc. But if what Delirium and Kelly say is correct
> (that it won't have any effect), I guess it's understandable. Thanks.
> --LV

It's a political issue, just not a partisan one.

bbatsell

Lord Voldemort wrote:

> On 6/3/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales@wikia.com> wrote:
>
>> I agree that the Wikimedia Foundation can have no position on such an
>> issue. We are neutral, politically.
>
> Well, the more recent of the bills, H.R.5417, is a bi-partisan bill.
> So it's not 'really' that huge of a "political" issue.

What's relevant, from a nonprofit organization's point of view, is not
whether the bill is "bipartisan". Merely the fact that it's a bill
proposed in a legislature makes it political, in the sense that it would
potentially involve the Foundation in political lobbying. Any such
involvement would have to be done carefully and in a limited fashion to
preserve nonprofit status. Probably not based on generalized
philosophical sympathies, but focused on issues that are specifically
relevant to our mission.

--Michael Snow
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