The Subsecretaria de Telecomunicaciones of Chile ruled that zero-rating services like Wikipedia Zero, Facebook Zero, and Google Free Zone, that subsidize mobile data usage, violate net neutrality laws and had to end the practice by June 1, 2014.
Wait, what?
David Meyer expresses a similar conviction in GigaOm, writing, “Broadly, though, it has the makings of a strategic disaster, stopping Facebook (and any other social network or messaging service) from entrenching itself in the mobile market in an unassailable way. And in the long term, for consumers, that is a very good thing indeed.”
The zero-rating mentioned is where the carriers don’t charge customers for the data access to those services. This is commonly advertised in these countries along with the cell phone service (“Free Facebook!” pops up a lot in the Philippines, where people often sell sim cards on the street and many small general stores recharge cell phone plans—adding some marginal pesos to your cell phone is often a pain). Pretty transparently not net neutrality, although if you are moving them from can’t-afford-any-sites to can-only-afford-facebook, it’s hard to see that as a bad thing, at least when you isolate it from the game theory / market capture elements, which are potent.
People are way ahead of you on this. For instance, Facebook Zero is Facebook’s Potatophone-friendly site. It’s text only and conserves data.
People are also trying to improve phone service and models in the developing world, and this has been pretty successful.
I’m glad to hear that. But it’d be nice if the efforts were more widespread. (Weird that I can’t use access it from my PC though).
Can you point to other concrete projects?
There’s also Wikipedia Zero
Wait, what?
Oh. Interesting.
The zero-rating mentioned is where the carriers don’t charge customers for the data access to those services. This is commonly advertised in these countries along with the cell phone service (“Free Facebook!” pops up a lot in the Philippines, where people often sell sim cards on the street and many small general stores recharge cell phone plans—adding some marginal pesos to your cell phone is often a pain). Pretty transparently not net neutrality, although if you are moving them from can’t-afford-any-sites to can-only-afford-facebook, it’s hard to see that as a bad thing, at least when you isolate it from the game theory / market capture elements, which are potent.
It’s also structured in a way that facebook pays the mobile carries for the bandwidth.
How does that work?