Facebook, Wikipedia and the dark future of zero-rated content

Net neutrality may be upheld by law - but for how long, as "business" comes a-knocking?

I was at the Sundance Film Festival recently, and had the good fortune to attend Sir Tim Berners-Lee's in-person launch of a film he's just made.

It's about net neutrality, and I've rarely seen Sir Tim as passionate about a personal message as that particular night.

The film - ForEveryone.Net - came as a partial response to the Federal Communications Commission's April 2015 ruling to cut out IP or content-based (i.e. "zero-rated") service restrictions in the US, not to mention the EU's vote, also in 2015, to - in theory - uphold net neutrality, but nevertheless to begin regulating European web content for "specialised services" (read: contractual deals and packages dreamt up by telcos).

Berners-Lee's message, both in the film and on the stage that night, was stark:
"They will wait until we're sleeping, because if you're a government or a company and you can control something, you'll want it," he implored.

"You want to control your citizens or exploit consumers - the temptation is huge. Yes, we can have things enshrined in law, but even then it won't necessarily stop people."

As if on cue, only weeks later, it was widely reported that India was set to completely reject Mark Zuckerberg's ‘generous' Free Basics scheme - as part of his Internet.org spinoff - an idea he has always sworn is to absolutely the benefit of the developing world, and nothing more.

Allowing its users free access to an internet entirely ordained by Facebook, Zuckerberg has been arguing for over a year that there's no ulterior motive and he just wants to help.

The Facebook founder's ongoing backchat culminated in a magnificently hectoring and condescending op ed in The Times of India last December, in which he stated "every" society has "certain basic services", comparing Free Basics to libraries, hospitals, education, and all the other services that are dwindling or - in some cases - barely ever even existed in the so-called first world.

"Free Basics is a bridge to the full internet and digital equality," he concluded.
"We want net neutrality, not this kind of BS", one Times reader promptly responded in the comments section.

I approached Facebook hoping to learn more about Free Basics - which is still successfully operating in 38 other countries - and the commercial theory behind it, but was told by a Facebook spokesperson that "We don't have much more to add", but to stay tuned for "more announcements" about it in 2016.

I was also directed to Zuckerberg's MWC interview, in which he touched on the India debacle and described the country's rejection of his advances as "disappointing for the mission" and "a major setback".

"We don't need to have people care about it; we care about it," he continued, with more than a glimmer of benign fascism.

As a side note, Microsoft founder Bill Gates considers his own ‘mission' to be, among many other humanitarian aims, to wipe out polio across the globe. He's sunk around $44.3bn of his own money into this so far. He doesn't do it through Microsoft, and he doesn't talk about it at technology conferences.

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Facebook, Wikipedia and the dark future of zero-rated content

Net neutrality may be upheld by law - but for how long, as "business" comes a-knocking?

Jimmy Wales is another face using "charity" as the basis for introducing a third-world internet.

While using community-edited knowledge fountain Wikipedia as your pathway to the World Wide Web might make a little more theoretical sense than a social network feed, Wales has attached other more inexplicable projects to Wikipedia Zero, including TPO, a believe it or not, social network, which he told me last year is "not competing with Facebook" and, unable to provide a specific use case at the time, remarked he "just likes to build things [he thinks] are cool".

TPO, to date, still only operates through existing telco networks in the UK and US, but imagine a service in which Wikipedia not only controlled which content a user accessed on a network, but did so through its own network to boot. It could ruffle a few feathers.

Zero-rated content, for anyone who fears for the future of net neutrality, seems absolutely the proposition to keep an eye on. I put it to net neutrality proponent Geoff Revill, who has worked on net neutrality and sustainable technology solutions with Ethos and Digital Catapult, as well as Krowdthink, his own non-data-collecting social network, that Zuckerberg is only looking out for the under-provisioned citizens of the developing world:

"I say to that - bullshit," Revill replies.

"And the reason I say that is because if they can't afford the cost of the data interface, then how the hell did they manage to buy their smartphone? Sorry mate, does not compute.

"Phones are coming down in price, but how many people are using, say £10 smartphones and how many are taking second generation stuff that are still sufficiently up to date?

If Facebook really cared that much, they'd make sure that the version of Facebook that was on the app store would run on three or five-year-old devices. But they don't, so they keep forcing us to upgrade."

Revill sees absolutely no legitimate reason for firms to be, as he sees it, "fundamentally changing" the rules that govern the internet - the same rules Sir Tim Berners-Lee put in place himself as his creation began to blossom in the early nineties.

While internet infrastructure is changing, creating a situation, says Revill, the response of business is to hide being "technical questions" like bandwidth and capacity when, in actuality, it's a smokescreen for simple, old-fashioned development of self-seeking business models:

"Large-scale organisations are having to adjust other organisations move their business models," he told me.

"It's all about owning the subscriber. You've got your, fixed line, wireless and mobile infrastructures and they're all contending for the endpoint, and the reason is because, at the end of the day, if you're truly a proponent of net neutrality, you're trying to push control of the internet to the edge, and that empowers the application.

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Facebook, Wikipedia and the dark future of zero-rated content

Net neutrality may be upheld by law - but for how long, as "business" comes a-knocking?

"That's not what large-scale infrastructure companies want, because at the edge is where the disruption occurs.

Revill sympathises, to a point that if big business is making long-term cash investments into infrastructure, they want to protect it for as long as that lasts.

But he also sees this as a relatively kneejerk response, because if net neutrality was upheld and innovation and competition allowed to continue, the model would continue to adapt organically.

'Changing the rules' instead will, in effect, lead to more rule changes down the line as the next natural shift in infrastructure rendered any particular scheme such as zero-rated content moot and would require a return to the drawing board.

"So if you stick to the one rule everybody understands, then at least you have predictability in the nature of the internet itself, and in that context you can have a degree of planning knowing full-well you have to build edge agility into your business model and investment planning, because you don't quite know what's going to come next," he reasons.

As for Facebook itself, Revill sees a company offering ‘free' internet in one hand, and an obvious cash-grab for user data in the other:

"Facebook is an example of trying to normalise the fact that anything you do on Facebook gives you as much privacy as Facebook decides to give you," he tells me.

"That's the antithesis of every privacy principle I know of."

Revill points out that when a company so large can get "sentiment and thought processes and interests and activities of the whole population", it's hard to believe they don't "share that with the government".

While I'd love to have offered Facebook's counter-argument here, the social network - as mentioned earlier - wouldn't offer me one.

With that in mind, I invite you to draw your own conclusions.

How many other countries will follow India's example and pull away from Zuck's gift horse, and how soon until other, perhaps more subtle, anti-net neutrality measures will sneak under the door and implant themselves in our digital lives in inextricable ways?