I once had a chat with a guy who grew up in a similar place with no internet. He mentioned that given the choice between no internet and a corporate curated internet, he would have wanted the latter.<p>Having thought on it more, I ended up drawing a comparison to child labor. We can agree that child labor (as in the 7 days a week, 12 hours a day variant) is all sorts of bad, including limiting a child's ability to get an education. But I remember reading in the past that bans on child labor have often times ended up with children turning to even more harmful means to survive or not surviving at all.<p>Is defending net neutrality in all cases worth the immediate short term costs? Should we even be the ones to make that decision? Or are some exceptions reasonable, such as non-profits? Other comments here have already pointed out different ways these exceptions could be abused, but how does the damage of that abuse equate to someone who was depending upon Wikipedia Zero to gain knowledge who is now cut off?<p>I'm really not sure.
> <i>There is a fundamental difference between a not-for-profit organisation...vs a for profit corporation</i><p>I'd like to petition my not-for-profit political action committee be zero rated on the Indian subcontinent. Less ridiculously, we have "alt fact" encyclopedias like the "Conservapedia" [1]. Should that be zero rated?<p>[1] <a href="http://www.conservapedia.com/Main%5FPage" rel="nofollow">http://www.conservapedia.com/Main%5FPage</a>
I feel like this is a slippery slope. As with all neutrality, net neutrality means that for good or bad you can't prefer some traffic. Any zero-rated service is not neutral. You can't block Facebook from being zero rated but allow Wikipedia.
To point out some thing, internet (and lot of telecom) is mostly limited to the cities, mainly the capital Kathmandu.<p>Secondly, there are fibers going through different parts of the country [0] but the country itself doesn't have much access to it. (Don't ask me, some politics are beyond me.Something to do with India and China both wanting to be the one influencing the region).<p>Third, Nepal Telecom used to be run by the Nepal government so they inherited all the legacy hardwares but hasn't upgraded it too much. Ncell owns a lot of the cellular infrastructure.[1] They probably feel like their customers can afford this data or they want other companies to bare the costs (im guessing). The article points to information from this other site [2] which seems inaccurate. For example, world link [3] is one of the better internet service provider and one of the first to provide cable internet. (I use to have a blazing 64kbps adsl unlimited line that worked from 9 pm to 6 am. Ah, good days). worldlink used to even have a server for youtube and some other google stuff. But I guess wikipedia was trying to make the data free for mobile i'm guessing?<p>tl;dr I don't blame Ncell if its only on them to provide free service.<p>-------------<p>[0] <a href="http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/business/china-links-nepal-with-optical-fibre-to-end-india-dependence/articleshow/52706038.cms" rel="nofollow">http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/busin...</a><p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ncell" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ncell</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.ktm2day.com/2015/02/20/internet-access-reaches-to-one-third-population-in-nepal/" rel="nofollow">http://www.ktm2day.com/2015/02/20/internet-access-reaches-to...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://www.worldlink.com.np/" rel="nofollow">https://www.worldlink.com.np/</a>
The downside of net neutrality I guess. You can't do something 'nice' as it violates the regulation, but ultimately if we let 'nice' things slide constantly then NN would just die out. Everyone would find an excuse for their own 'niceness.' T-mobile's music streaming exception is the most obvious one in the states.<p>I don't see why non-profit status would be an exception. I can start a non-profit version of my service and still pay myself a handsome salary, perhaps more due to all the money saved by being a zero service. Facebook can just spin off a Facebook Foundation or somesuch and get around these rules. The abuse would be endless.
The wire.in is a dangerous website which consistently promotes companies and policies from other countries without understanding the nuance of the subcontinent. It is high time, media magazines write down detailed information about the executives of such organization, how they (capital fund and revenue source of the organization) make money and why their articles will have a bias or not.
Misleading title, access has not been shut off at all.<p>What has changed, is a provider decided not to participate in giving away their services for free, which they should be free to do. FUD<p>Now we're feeling entitled to have someone deliver wireless content for free, or we throw a fit?
Nepal likes to follow what India tells them to do. I'm not surprised. But there is nepal telecom which hopefully has still kept it free? Ncell is generally considered bad because they charge extra cost and has bad network.
Some background:<p>Ncell is the company that was created by Swedish/Finnish telecom company TeliaSonera. They made a lot of PR buzz about bringing connectivity to Himalaya etc.<p>They exited Tibet last year and sold the subsidiary to a Malaysian company.