Wikipedia Zero

~ the last words ~

i understand metered internet from the wrong decade. My first years online in Turkey were dial-up, where the cost was the phone line ticking over by the minute and you learned to open what you needed and hang up, which shapes how you read. But that is a 1998 problem solved by a 2006 broadband contract, and Wikipedia Zero existed for people whose 2014 was still metered by the megabyte on a phone that was their only computer. Different problem, opposite direction of travel.

The Wikimedia Foundation launched it on 12 May 2012 with Digi in Malaysia, borrowing the mechanic from Facebook Zero. No money changed hands. Wikimedia went to mobile operators and asked them to zero-rate traffic to Wikipedia, meaning a customer could read it without the bytes counting against a data allowance or a prepaid balance. For an operator it was cheap goodwill on a service with no video in it. For Wikimedia it was distribution in markets where the foundation had almost no presence.

It grew fast and it grew large. At its height the program covered 97 operators in more than 72 countries, and Wikimedia put the number of people with access at somewhere between 800 and 900 million. It won a South by Southwest activism award in 2013. Banglalink brought it to Bangladesh in October 2013, and the last significant launch was Roshan in Afghanistan in September 2017.

~ the record ~

~ the objection ~

Zero-rating is the practice of a carrier deciding which traffic is free, and it does not stop being that when the free thing is an encyclopedia. Chile's telecoms regulator ruled on 30 May 2014 that the arrangement broke the country's net neutrality law and gave the operators until 1 June to stop. Wikipedia Zero was switched off there along with the commercial zero-rated services it had nothing to do with, which is exactly the point the law was making.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation put it plainly, saying that whatever the intent behind efforts like Wikipedia Zero, zero-rated services are a dangerous compromise. The second criticism was subtler and harder to test. In markets where a handful of services were free and the open web was not, people started treating those services as the internet. Wikimedia was uneasy about this in a way Facebook was not, having spent its whole existence arguing that the encyclopedia is a starting point rather than a destination.

~ what people did with it ~

In March 2016 Motherboard reported the thing nobody had planned for. Users in countries where Wikipedia was free and everything else was not had worked out that Wikimedia Commons accepts file uploads, and were using it as a free file-sharing network, hiding movies and music inside uploads and passing around the links in closed groups. Wikipedia's volunteer administrators spent their time deleting them and arguing about whether deleting them was the right instinct.

It is the most human outcome available. Give people one free door in a house where every other door costs money, and some of them will use it to move furniture. The behavior was against the rules and it was also a precise description of what the program had actually built, which was not access to knowledge but access, priced at zero, to one company's servers.

~ the actual end ~

Wikimedia announced the wind-down on 16 February 2018 in a post about a new approach to partnerships. The reasons given were undramatic. Uptake had been declining since 2016 and operator interest had cooled. Mobile data was also getting cheap fast enough in most of the covered markets that waiving the charge on one site was no longer a meaningful gift. A related admission sat underneath it: in a lot of those countries, not enough people knew what Wikipedia was for the free access to be worth using.

No new partnerships were signed and the existing ones ran out over the course of 2018. There was no replacement program and no shutdown notice on anyone's phone, because from the user's side nothing visibly happened. The page just started costing data again.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »