Would net neutrality hurt the poor?

Eli Dourado has a new piece of note:

In much of the world, the net is not neutral, thanks to companies like Facebook and Google.Facebook Zero is an initiative launched in 2010 to give customers of 50 carriers, mostly in the developing world, access to a lightweight version of Facebook on their WAP-enabled feature phones at no charge. Users can post, like, poke, and comment to their hearts’ content, but if they want to view photos or access non-Facebook sites, they incur the usual data charge. The model has been so successful at growing Facebook adoption in Africa that Google followed suit with a competing offering, Google Free Zone in 2012. Lest anyone think that this is a cruel ploy by evil, for-profit corporations to trap the poor inside their walled gardens, the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation also copied Facebook’s idea with Wikipedia Zero, to great effect.

…non-neutrality can also help to fund necessary network buildouts on an ongoing basis. By giving access to Facebook, Google, and Wikipedia away as a loss-leader, carriers are serving with their basic tier of service those who can’t afford more, and habituating those who can afford to click beyond the walled garden to using the mobile web. This price discrimination not only increases access but also raises more revenue than a neutral strategy would. Developing-world carriers need that revenue if they ever intend to build the kinds of networks that will support widespread Internet use. Net neutrality, in other words, would not only keep the poorest offline, it would keep investment in poor-country telecom infrastructure down for longer.

A similar, but less stark, dynamic is playing out in rich countries. Anyone who has ever used their Kindle’s included 3G service has benefited from network non-neutrality; after all, you can’t use it to access non-Amazon services. Absent Amazon’s non-neutral arrangement with wireless carriers, you’d have to pay a nontrivial monthly fee to access books via the cellular network, which would mean that most people would forgo cellular and stick to Wi-Fi. Again, we observe a non-neutral arrangement expanding access and saving people money.

Read the whole thing.

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