When you apply skepticism and care in equal amounts, you get bliss.
Today evening viswa found a kitten outside in the drain. He brought it to hostel and I thought I’d adopt it.
Last week I had (what I thought was) the rare privilege to have a conversation with Jimmy Wales, the reluctant-to-admit-so co-founder of Wikipedia.
It was all a part of the #NetNeutrality campaign to save the Internet. I built a Firefox add-on called Zero Internet which would simulate what happens to a poor mother of three (who can’t afford a data-pack) when she visits the “Internet” through Internet.org.
I submitted it to reddit, and for a few hours, it was the top post on r/india (which, to be honest, has been the rendezvous for sane Indian Internet users, and would have upvoted even if Deepika Padukone supported Net Neutrality).
Surprisingly, Jimmy Wales responded (with harsh criticism), both on twitter and on reddit, as if he was personally leading Internet.org. He said:
“This is deeply dishonest and makes me think you haven’t even done the most basic homework as to how this works.
In all cases, people who are using Internet.org are on data plans (often daily plans or plans with quite restrictive data caps). One reason Facebook has been successful at getting ISPs to go along with this is that it is viewed as a win/win by the carriers – it gets people online and using data.
For the very poor, if they can’t even afford a daily plan, then they don’t look at the Internet at all. At least this way they have something. For those who are a bit less poor, the program offers them a way to save money on data – they can look at some sites for free (like Wikipedia) and use their precious data for other things.
Your plugin gives a completely false impression.”
…which is quite contrary to what Mark Zuckerberg is making people believe (He says Internet.org is about bringing Internet access to those who do not have it yet) and also calling my add-on dishonest was dishonest. For poor people who can’t afford data plans, going out of the sites allowed by Internet.org is impossible. And that’s exactly what my add-on does.
So, on twitter, I went on a couple of rounds of arguments over the issue. And it turns out Jimmy Wales really, truly believes that Internet.org is the only way for poor people in India to access Internet.
Afterwards, Pirate Praveen helped me understand why I was feeling awkward.
“the problem is with your expectation. We want angels and devils so we don’t have to think. But everyone has both these aspects in them. Just because someone does a lot of good is not a reason to support them when they do something wrong. Attacking someone who is in opposing camp is easy. But standing up to someone in your own group needs immense courage and conviction. Every privilleged person thinks its their god given mission to help the poor and show their kindness. They do not want to acknowledge that their privillege is the result of historic oppression and they are part of the reason why they remain poor. They think poor people needs charity and kindness. What we really need is a conscious collective effort to end systematic oppression of people and that will need questioning of our own roles and privilleges. Accepting our role in creating the poor is much harder than feeling good about helping poor.”
In fact, I now have a tagline for Wikipedia (which I would have never thought about till last week)
“Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to *some* of all human knowledge. That’s what we’re doing.”
NB: Jimmy Wales is an Objectivist. His life philosophy is based on that. And therefore any comment on where Objectivism gets it wrong is appreciated.
I truly believe that the Internet and the Open Web has played and will continue to play a massive role in my learning. That’s why I had started MMC MedFox Club – to spread the Internet love to more medical students.
Today that Internet is about to be saved from being damaged by TRAI and Telecom companies. And the following letter to Mysore MP Pratap Simha is one of my contributions to the effort.
Sub: Please come out in support of the Open Web and #NetNeutrality
Sir,
I’m a final year MBBS student of Mysore Medical College.
As a student, the Internet has vastly improved my life – learning from books not even available in India, talking to alumni who are mentoring me from abroad, communicating with professors, friends, taking open courses from foreign universities, watching disease symptoms, operations, examination, etc on YouTube, etc.
Recently TRAI has announced a consultation paper on regulating Over The Top services which will include YouTube, Gmail, and other such services which I mentioned above.
I have gone through the 118 page document myself and I find it heavily biased, insensitive towards Internet users like me, and blind towards the founding principles of the Internet. Reading between the lines makes me suspect an immoral association between TRAI and Telecom operators, for the paper is more concerned about protecting the profit margin of TSPs rather than defending the rights of the consumer.
With your experience in investigative journalism, you must be able to judge this situation better than me.
I urge you to come out in public support of net neutrality as a democratic representative. Also, if possible you should use all your reach and influence to make other MPs aware of this issue, and make journalists cover the same.
Attaching some links for your reference.
Expectant young social citizen,
Akshay S Dinesh
—
Attachments:
* TRAI consultation paper: http://trai.gov.in/Content/ConDis/10743_23.aspx
* The Hindu editorial “The importance of net neutrality” : http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/editorial/the-importance-of-net-neutrality/article7065661.ece
* Odisha MP Tathagata Satpathy’s open letter to TRAI http://ibnlive.in.com/news/odisha-mp-earns-internet-points-by-writing-a-letter-to-the-trai-chairman-in-support-of-net-neutrality/538497-79.html
Net Neutrality is the concept that all data traffic on the Internet should
be considered equal. There shall be no discrimination.
So, say,
if you pay for 1MBps Internet, your ISP should give you 1MBps itself
(neither high, nor low) no matter if you use torrents, or WhatsApp, or
Facebook, or Wikipedia, or YouTube, or whichever site/service you’re
connecting to.
But, for people like Reliance, Airtel, Uninor,
Vodafone, etc this is bad for their pocket. Because people won’t send
SMS or make phone calls, they can get money only via data packs. And
they are greedy for making more money.
So, what they have been
trying to do, is to charge people differently if they’re using Viber,
WhatsApp, Facebook, etc. This comes in the form of “free” Wikipedia,
“free” Facebook offers, or “special” Facebook packs, “special” WhatsApp
packs, etc. These all give differential treatment for different
services. And that is bad!
Last week, they forced TRAI to release a
consultation paper for “regulating” (read: putting restrictions on) these services (Over The Top services
– Whatsapp, Facebook, etc.). According to this paper, a lot of ideas –
like licensing the OTT services, slowing them down unless you pay TSPs
more, making the OTTs pay the TSPs, etc – are being considered to be put
in place.
A lot of people are already campaigning to protect the
Web by keeping it neutral. Example:
What we need to do is: raise awareness of why net neutrality is important, and ask stakeholders to send their comments to advqos@trai.gov.in
If anything is unclear, please ask in comments.
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| Image: “Free Software” by user ryyo on flickr |
Today is a holiday. Tomorrow Kreida'15 starts. The batch organizing it seems to be enthusiastic enough to write 2k12 on every T-shirt, even that of people from other batches.