Subject: Re: [gaia] [ciresearchers] Facebook app to offer free internet in Zambia

From: Matthew Ford <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 18 Aug 2014 10:16:58 +0100

On 31 Jul 2014, at 23:37, Arjuna Sathiaseelan <[email-masked]> wrote:

> I think zero rating crucial sites (like health, wikipedia, search etc)
> are important especially in emerging regions where there is no
> "competition" to provide any low cost comms/services in the first
> place!

Who determines what is 'crucial'?

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From: Arjuna Sathiaseelan <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2014 20:24:58 -0400

Hello Mat,
  Very good question to which I dont have a definitive answer. this
may be very subjective (for e.g. in the UK the NHS online, gov.uk
services etc may be deemed crucial for paying your bills online etc)..

In rural/developing regions - health services, farmer alerts, jobs - I
would have said anything that's non-profit oriented but there are
several profit oriented services that provide vital
information/services for e.g. MIT/Stanford online courses on youtube!

But how do we determine what is crucial and who determines this - I am
not sure..

My underlying argument is we cannot just brush off facebook zero or
wikipedia zero saying that they are going to kill off local
competition with the net neutrality argument since

1/ reluctance of other service providers to provide low cost services
to the target demography in the first place - if they want to compete,
they have to lower their costs which is good.
2/ we also need to understand that there is a social obstacle where
there's a significant percent who dont see the value in using the
Internet - and by zero rating access to useful sites, people may see
value in it and may get online.
3/I still dont see why an old man who is being remotely monitored
needs to pay for broadband when he doesnt use the WWW - zero rating
such health services are useful in my opinion.

Regards

On 18 August 2014 05:16, Matthew Ford <[email-masked]> wrote:
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-- 
Arjuna Sathiaseelan | http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~as2330/

---

From: Arjuna Sathiaseelan <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 Aug 2014 09:09:37 -0400

Btw - I once had a weird thought on something related to this (to
allocate a specific IPv6 address space for all critical services so
that access is always free to the user)

and we had some discussion on this on the end2end mailing list:
http://www.postel.org/pipermail/end2end-interest/2012-September/008474.html

Regards
Arjuna