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RE: WHAT IS NET NEUTRALITY & WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?

in #decenternet6 years ago (edited)

The battle to keep the Internet open, neutral and free of censorship is a huge one. It’s very important that we have initiatives like Decenternet that aim to guarantee Net Neutrality.

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I completely agree and with the serious amounts of effort deployed in the US in #saveNetNeutrality and #BattleForTheInternet type campaigns - it is hugely evident that those in favour of Net Neutrality will have to be battle hardy too! I've not heard of anything like Decenternet until these last few days so will enjoy reading your article about them and their solution, which for the benefit of the readers is published here.

Completely true! I am very interested to follow this and see how it performs. I wonder what the potential weaknesses of this approach are.

There is a really interesting angle, from a Humanitarian perspective. Net Neutrality rules would make it possibly difficult for "zero-rating" which is effectively re-imbursement to the user for data usage from certain web address. The three zero-rating practices I have heard are google-zero, facebook-zero and Wikipedia-zero. It is common in the developing world and could be seen as a good thing for acquiring education and knowledge at zero cost.

The organization partnered with telecommunications companies to provide free access to Wikipedia for people in developing countries, under a program called Wikipedia Zero, without requiring mobile data to access information. The concept is known as zero rating. Said Wikimedia Foundation officer Gayle Karen Young, "Partnering with telecom companies in the near term, it blurs the net neutrality line in those areas. It fulfills our overall mission, though, which is providing free knowledge."Wikipedia

It sounds like positive discrimination and very noble: but a unilateral policy of neutrality without discrimination has a lot of merit.