Opposition to Facebook's new internet.org
techinasia.com
techinasia.com
Sorry if this is something obvious to everyone else, but could you explain why it wouldn't be open and why that's a bad thing? Is this some sort of "centralization of power" issue?
With Facebook's Internet.org or the "Free Basics" they would be the gatekeepers of defining what the free basic are. It creates a sort of economic divide - why would people people pay to access your site, when a similar big player is providing services on the Facebook's free basic plan?
And if the argument assumes that they'll eventually have the ability to get full internet, but won't want it at whatever price it costs, then isn't that their choice? If having a free service makes them unwilling to pay for a better service, what's the problem?
There's no options being denied here. For anyone that wants, Facebook's offering has only benefits. If someone thinks it has drawbacks, they're free not to use it. I seriously don't see the problem here.
According to you, if internet.org is so horribly evil, why would anyone freely choose to sign up for it?
This largely isn't correct. There are other providers, they just cost some money.
This [0] comment by aravindet captures everything that one needs to know. These people are going to get the internet, the question is whether we should allow some company to spend its capital turning them into a captive market for its own financial gain.
There are other providers. Aircel is offering free data at 64kbps. Airtel has started subsidized browsing at off-peak hours. Mozilla has a proposal for ad-subsidized Internet access. And all this is while Internet user base is already growing at 4% every month!
I don't see this changing any time in the future, either. There are still a lot of people without decent internet access here. I am pretty sure nearly all of these people will use Facebook's version of the internet, were it made available to them.
And don't have any illusions: there is no such thing as "net neutrality" here: internet speeds for domestic internet is way faster and cheaper than "real" internet. People have domestic-only internet plans, simply because it's all they need. So there already is massive restrictions put on the internet here, and I would argue that internet.org is not as evil as the local ISPs are.
Smartphone/app only internet is completely different from desktop-centric internet like it is in western countries.
Education is low here, but smartphone penetration very high. It's all about sharing pictures and videos through Facebook.
There are other ways to provide internet connectivity to people - by allowing them to access the entire internet and not limited websites. The Mozilla Foundation runs a program with Grameenphone, where users get free data in exchange for watching an advertisement. It also runs a program with Orange in Africa, where those who purchase a $37 handset get 500 MB of free data.
edit: I accidentally plugged 12 months, not 24 months. 24 months gives 250% growth. I think your numbers are wrong; 150% growth to only 60% implies the current base is 24%???
My source for these numbers is TRAI (India's equivalent of FCC) reports. Happy to be corrected.
And no, the problem is NOT that some people get to use FB for free. The problem is that we have no reason to give a privileged treatment to FB, given that they are NOT contributing in expanding the network at all. FB doesn't bear the bandwidth costs for internet.org, the telcos do. And telcos are already regulated under TRAI and have corresponding obligations. If they want to do commercial deals like these, let us first open the telecom industry to full competition.
http://www.trai.gov.in/WriteReadData/WhatsNew/Documents/PR-T...
With a population of 1.24B, that makes 30% population being online. So 150% growth in 2 years will take us to 75%.
How can allowing more people limited internet, where before they had no internet, possibly be a bad thing?
A more noble implementation of the idea would provide low-bandwidth connectivity to any site (maybe with a browser that only loads text by default). The service could still deliver local ads to pay for the bandwidth.
And saying that there's a more noble option they could have done doesn't mean that what they did do is wrong.
What's the analog to this health risk in the Facebook example? "Digital segregation" is a nice abstract concept, which falls apart when you remember that the people using this have no other way to get internet, so they can't possibly be better off without Facebook.
Consider a utilitarian analogy. Suppose people need to see a benefit of 10 "units" before they are motivated to do something to obtain the benefit. Free Facebook might have a benefit of 6 units, which prevents people from reaching the activation energy to seek out the 15 units of benefit from true Internet access.
this programm really has to die. and we all should help killing and burying it.
@ikeboy/facebook employee
How well did the middle ages work out with it's 1-book policy? It regressed society from the very modern greek society with democracy to the so called dark ages. abondoning science and pluralistic cultures for centuries.
Slaves get choices too, to die or live as slaves. Some might even find happiness as being slaves.
The mechanism this would work by is ignorance, if someone is unaware that they only have access to a tiny subsection and believes that they have internet access (and we all know plenty of people that thought AOLs walled garden was the internet) then they are less likely to seek out real unfettered internet access.
Reckon Facebook are going to have big banners up telling them this is only a fraction of the net? I very much doubt it.
If you're so against an open internet what are you doing on HackerNews? Surely there is somewhere you could post about this on Facebook. Oh wait a second you love having access to the whole internet you just don't think people poorer than you deserve it.
Did I say I was against an open internet? I'm against government regulation of the Internet, while the people arguing with me here are in favor. There's more than one way to frame this about "open".
I could also snarkily ask you why you don't think the poor deserve to have access to anything, which is what will happen if internet.org isn't allowed.
If you really think that poor people deserve free internet, start a charity that brings it to them. But banning other providers from taking gradual steps towards internet access won't help them.
Imagine if MySpace at its height could have killed off Facebook, Twitter, TenCent, and anything else which looked like competition.
- it should be access to all internet. I think we all agree on that, including Zuckerberg, however it is childish to think that an ISP would be willing to work with that. The greatest challenge in a project of this magnitude is working with the local service providers. They are the ones that need to be convinced, and you'd need to work with to make this happen. I think a good exercise for everyone here is to think, how would I solve the problem of internet illiteracy.. Realistically?
The "watch an ad an get internet" does not sound to me as appealing for the service providers. They are basically using internet, to give internet, to someone that can't afford internet? I don't think this initiative would be succesful.
- "This is only a hinderance and hurts when internet is eventually accesible to everyone." This is what Paul Graham calls indefinite optimism. How exactly do you think this will just happen? The answer is little by little working with the service providers, phone manufacturers, etc. which is what fb does, and the fact they actually got something that everyone is willing to accept is pretty unbelievable.
So instead of idealistically oposing something that would make disconnected people lives better, how about thinking how would you solve the problem? Align all the major players over an initiative that would hardly lead to high revenues.
And if you doubt the usefulness of it how about you check the access it gives. I personally consider wikipedia pretty useful.
It isn't much more than an attempt at monopoly, and I think it seems more egregious because of it being explicitly targeted at the poor. In truth, it seems unlikely to me that those people won't simply be able to migrate to other services when they can afford it, but I also find it hard to believe that there won't be some (possibly significant) monopolisation effect.
For some additional perspective, here's a view from India: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0w_YhZUYeA
If we're worried about long-term effects, but concede there's a gain for everyone short-term, isn't the right thing to do to let them do it now, and if these negative effects materialize, then stop it?
On a personal level, whilst I don't have strong feelings about the campaign against internet.org, I wouldn't mind if they succeeded. I do have to question why we think net neutrality is so important for us, but not for the poorest in the world. Did you watch the video I linked to? Before watching that I (obviously very naively) hadn't really considered the issue in net neutrality terms, preferring to see it as you appear to, in terms of something-better-than-nothing, but now I'm really not so sure.
So any argument of the form "but it's against net neutral" won't work for me.
"Nah, just keep smoking, once you have cancer you can still stop."
I hope you see the problem with that rationale.
Also, just like smoking, once the harm is big enough, there's no easy coming back.
How is allowing internet.org now and stopping to allow it if and when it starts causing people to have less internet than they would otherwise (assuming that extra choice is bad here, which I do not concede) a bad thing?
Right. Once the downsides of smoking were realized, it was quickly brought to an end.
The argument is that internet.org gets people some access right away, and in the long term screws up infrastructure development.
The negative effects are being caused from day one. You can't just cut the program after five years to keep all the good and prevent the bad.
I oppose internet.org due to the permanent damage that it will cause to the Internet itself. Please see my earlier comment for how this will happen.
Internet.org probably won't shut down even if strong net neutrality is legislated in India; they would merely change their program to be compliant, by using a data cap on free (beer and freedom) internet use.
The cost for ISPs are the same in either scenario. The fiction about internet.org being "cheaper" to provide than the open Internet doesn’t hold water.
Internet growth in India: 20% of Indians have Internet access today, a number that has grown at 30% annually for the last five years. Mobile phone use grew from 20% to 75% in five years, so it is likely that Internet use would also get there by 2019 without internet.org.
Just who the hell are you to deny your poorer countrymen free access, based on your personal beliefs from a position of pure privilege?
Would you give up your internet access for the same cause? No, I didn't think so.
All you do in that situation is creating roadblocks for small ISPs. It's probably not hard to convince the incumbent telcos to get in on it. All you have to do is create a good business proposal. Telcos have tried similar things since ever since IP started to win, especially in the mobile space, but they've never had the services people want.
This is an unholy alliance between telcos and big content, and could very well succeeed. But I am still an optimist. I believe the market will win out in the end, and one thing we know for certain is that what people really want is the Internet. It will only delay that for a number of years, but that's hardly any consolation for those potential entrepreneurs stuck in that particular irrational market.
Participation on internet.org is subject to approval by Facebook and ISPs. They choose the winners on their platform, not end users.
Imagine a world where, say, 20% of users are on internet.org. If you're building a consumer service that benefits from network effects, you must be on internet.org or else you will be eaten up by a competitor who is. Facebook, through its veto over internet.org participation, can now play an outsize role in deciding which consumer internet services get traction and which don’t.
App developers will divert resources from building features that users want, into building features that gets them perks from Facebook — probably by pushing more and more user data into the “open” graph. This would not just harm internet.org consumers, it will harm every internet user.
Essentially Zuckerberg is trying to use the strategy Carlos Slim used in Mexico with mobile phones: be the only game in town for years by making exclusivity deals with the government and by the time the competition is finally able to compete in a free(er) market, Slim has such a head start as to be unstoppable. Except now Zuck is doing this at a billion scale rather than a Mexico scale.
I think the Google balloon internet project has far more value than this. Google wants you to use their services, but at least they are interested in the entire internet for the poor and not just Facebook-y type access.
On a regular basis I'll hear someone mention 'their website' and when I ask for the URL it is clear from their reply that what they mean is they have a Facebook page for their group/business/whatever. When I press further they seem to understand the concept that owning a domain name and having a 'website' on Facebook are not exactly the same. These are normal users, not stupid people, and this is how perceive things right now.
This is anecdotal and I don't have any peer-reviewed studies to cite but I suspect this is pretty common and I wonder if others are seeing the same thing?
The same people who spend most of their time on Facebook would probably be very annoyed if all of a sudden their online banking would need to be done through Facebook with a Facebook-approved bank, or if they couldn't book airplane tickets on a third-party site or check the weather and so on.
That's the problem with internet.org; it's not that people wouldn't spend most of their time on Facebook, but it's that it makes it harder for non-Facebook entities to get access to these users, essentially building a Facebook-branded moat.
For example, say that building an ISP to reach these users has a fixed cost of x. This means that if that ISP has n users, the costs of building that ISP are spread out amongst those n users (ie. x/n); however, with internet.org, this would lower the demand for this ISP (because n will be smaller, due to some people not interested in having anything else but Facebook) and because the price of getting actual internet will be higher.
It's definitely a good move for Facebook, but creates large negative externalities for other people. A better move overall (but less so for Facebook), would be to give free access to the actual internet but let them access Facebook on its own merits. If Facebook offers such value to these users (and it definitely does for a lot of people), then there is no need to wall these users off of the rest of the internet.
Edit: formatting.
I'd argue that this has even darker motivations than AOL ever did though. At least with AOL people had a choice. There were alternatives to living inside the walled garden.
This seems more like indentured servitude. I suspect strongly that the poorest people that Facebook is targeting here have no option as they can't afford any data charges at all, so will sign up because its this or nothing.
Many of these folks may never have even seen the internet. There's a very real chance that a lot of them will believe that the curated Facebook internet is the internet proper.
I'm sure Mark Zuckerberg considers himself to be a fair and reasonable gatekeeper so doesn't see this as a problem, but this is almost certainly going to be abused sooner or later (spoiler: sooner).
EDIT: this is especially true considering Internet.org, despite its pitch, does not actually bring much to the connectivity infrastructure. It works in places where mobile connectivity infrastructure already exists, just (presumably) not affordable enough. It is purely an economic arbitrage game, not infrastructure development.
EDIT2: I also speculate that competition between big players (e.g. Google vs Facebook) will not help resolve the problem either. Since all incumbents benefit from stuff like this, and almost all newcomers lose, big guys have few incentives to break down such paradigms after they are built up (very much like gerrymandering that Democrats and Republicans both like as it benefits them all).
I also found Tim Berners-Lee trashing the buisness model, and philanthropist Bill Gates pointing out there are more important problems to solve in the developing world before connectivity.
I didn't think I could be more negative on Facebook's shitty internet.org, but now I am. Thanks for encouraging me to do the research!
Perhaps 'connectivity' is what Mark Zuckerberg is good at solving. We all should be doing things we are good at if its not harming anyone. At this moment people just have theories that internet.org might not be a good thing. People can be wrong, only time will tell.
It's worse than that. Creating a substandard product and giving it away for free destroys infrastructure development. A large mass of customers are going to take the free offering and each one who does and would otherwise have paid comes out of the budget the provider has available for expansion and upgrades.
This doesn't change whether Facebook is building their own infrastructure or leasing someone else's. If they lease existing infrastructure then they're large enough to pay wholesale rather than retail prices and the (large) difference comes out of the local provider's capital budget. If they build their own and sell below cost then it's even worse -- competitors will lose both subscribers and margins if not go out of business entirely.
Here's how I expect Aquila to work: They'll install it and drive all the local competitors out of business, and the incumbents' infrastructure will fall into disrepair or be sold for scrap. Then at some future date there will be an economic recession and Facebook accountants will wonder whether it makes sense to keep all these drones in the air to provide free access to a bunch of customers in developing countries with no money who are therefore highly undesirable to advertisers. The answer will be no.
So they'll either discontinue the project or start charging money. At that point those people will have gone from paying money for the real internet to either paying money for the fake internet, or having no access whatsoever.
For one, India's tech growth (even if it is in outsourcing) has been because it escaped the then watchers. They are more likely to build rules which help close partners to the government, or people who spend the time to help the government formulate their plans (Like facebook is).
Secondly, even in America, the one thing which is pushing adoption of better speeds in cities is the availability of a competitor like Google Fibre.
India had a lot more competition, but the recent Supreme Court judgement cancelled a lot of licenses which were given out, and many players were forced to requote for licenses in their circles.
As you can imagine, many smaller players were completely cut out, and today most of the market share for mobile telephony is distributed between 4 players.
Iteration can mean iteration of incrementally more regulatory capture each time.
Remember, Indian telecom brought 1 billion users to mobile in a span of just 15 years. The same thing will happen on the Internet!
For the well example it's a quick jog to a man handing out sealed bottles of branded water. The library is curtailed and pre selected and the water is not open but closed and walled within Facebook.
Except that's just it. It's an apparent upside.
This assumes the existence of people who have phones but can't afford internet plans. That's not the case in India, at least. Data plans are pretty cheap, and if you can afford a phone that works on the modern internet (i.e., supports Facebook), you can afford these.
So it's not really providing some benefit. It's letting the impoverished save a small fraction of their income (okay, that is a benefit, but probably not major), and it's moving people off the Internet onto the Facebookternet.
A lot of the non-Internet-users are people who don't really want to or care to use the Internet, not due to poverty.
By and large, mobile Internet users in poor countries are extremely careful with their metered Internet usage and try to only use data while on wifi. 50% of Indians with smartphones deactivate their data, as a minimum-wage earning Indian needs to work 18 hours to afford a 500 MB top-up[2].
[2] http://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-...
(Edited to replace "typical Indian" with "minimum-wage earning.")
what wifi?
There's not much wifi in rural areas, one place that Internet.org is targeting. In cities, yes, but then they already had access to wifi.
I don't deny that folks will be judicious with their Internet. I'm refuting the humanitarian benefit touted by Facebook: "people who wouldn't be able to afford or access the Internet can access at least some parts of it". That's wrong. People who can afford the Internet will be able to access it more freely, agreed. And I did say that that is a benefit, but not major, especially the way things are going with respect to connectivity and data costs.
And as countless others have mentioned in this thread, Internet.org is not the only solution in place that tries to provide this.
If such people didn't exist, neither would Internet.org.
Does anyone know of any good charities helping build out information infrastructure for communities that would massively benefit from it, so that I can contribute constructively as well as criticizing Facebook's approach?
http://www.trust.org/slideshow/?id=356b4ab3-7e12-440f-9781-b...
Not sure how you'd give them cash.
That's the point they want to sell. It's like offering a poor man some sweet drink. Until and unless you consider what the drink is and what it's long term affects are, it appears only as charity: giving a poor man a drink.
Exactly what the government likes, wants & supports - perfect for mass surveillance.
Best case: Single point of access & monopoly situations. Which is why these huge companies will always be treated favorably by the government (despite what it may look like).
Most people that are not connected do not see a value on it. They think it won't help them in any way in their lives, that's a rich kid thing. The idea of the project I believe is to provide a free taste of limited functionality, to open that door to new opportunities. Then decide whether the value is worth it or not, and purchase an internet plan as his/her requirements dictate. It's a sort of "internet" literacy that wants to be spread. Feel free to actually check what the internet.org package offers, and imagine how it can help someone appreciate the value of being connected.
Right now due to lack of knowledge people without any access to internet have no idea how their crippling their own future, and their children's future. I believe the idea of internet.org is to provide some sort of basic free services that may help people decide whether full internet connectivity is for them or not, and try to change the "that's a thing only for rich/tech/lazy/young people" mentality that may prevail in rural areas for example.
In full disclosure I worked for fb for 1.5 years and haven't worked for them for half a year. These are my personal opinions .
It's not that the article is missing empathy, it's that the article describes how Internet.org is devoid of empathy.
So this criticism seems utterly irrelevant.
Reasonable short term counterpoints to opposing Internet.org exist —more access and faster. Facebook is leveraging those counter points into a market strategy that undermines one of the central value propositions of the current open internet.
It's defensible; it's not all bad. But its not ideal; it is distinctively bad in a serious way.
Ideally Facebook would promote access to the open web, rather than undermine it by promoting access to the Facebook version.
You're one of the few exceptions to admit that it isn't all bad. Most arguments against internet.org refuse to acknowledge the pros of it and thereby in my view are not objective or honest.
There are countless other examples. If someone feels very negatively about "Free Basics", I'm not sure why they're not being objective or honest by leaving out potential pros.
In the still-early days of internet at least 3 companies had Free Dial-Up Internet service suplimented with ads. They gave you access to ALL of the internet and simply put an ad banner on the bottom of the screen at all times you were connected. We had Net-Zero (FREE dialup internet with Ads), K-mart Blue-Light (FREE dialup with ads), and Juno (FREE dial up with ads). All three of them went off of the FREE ad based model eventually because it was unsustainable (downloads and Napster required larger and larger amounts of bandwidth). This wouldn't work today due to ad blockers and torrents. Internet.org doesn't even give you access to the whole internet. So the only way for this to pay off is for Facebook and Co to become a monopoly in India.
You might not care because it's an American company expanding its influence abroad, but how would you feel if China did the same to us in the USA? And we had no chance of ever developing Facebook?
Facebook connects people and there are a billion people in India so it only makes sense to get them online or better yet get them online while keeping them in a walled garden for as long as possible so they can reap the maximum rewards out of it.
Facebook portrays this as a humanitarian effort to bring poor people online (see internet.org ads on YouTube which portrays this as giving people free electricity) but it's only for their own benefit in the long run.
It's sad to see that Facebook is trying to kill the same thing which made it what it is. Zuckerberg should wonder what it would be if 20% of India was still using MySpace because they offered it for free in 2009 and didn't give them any option to sign up for Facebook.
> Facebook portrays this as a humanitarian effort ...
> but it's only for their own benefit in the long run.
IMO quite a bit. The substantive criticisms would be unchanged; but two accelerants would be removed from the fire: the insinuation that the service 'is' the internet or some substantive subset of it; and that it is a charitable undertaking first and foremost.
In my mind, this is an even bigger issue than their lack of frankness.
That being said, I feel that these discussions do little other than blame Facebook. What we need is a good alternative that _does_ provide a full internet connection albeit at low speeds to people in developing regions of the world and the only way that I see we can possibly achieve this is to have good legislation. I remember having just a dial up modem, and that was enough for me to move up the social ladder; information can bring about social mobility.
Right now, the _value_ of the internet is evident to most people in government, all that we need to do is catalyze the process of making internet a fundamental right in most developing countries, or at least making internet _available_ and _affordable_ to everyone even if that means giving tax cuts to people.
And then, there _are_ alternatives. Aircel has launched free data at 64kbps. Airtel has announced cashback scheme for data usage. Mozilla will be launching an ad-subsidized data access plan. All of these are network neutral.
> Can we please stop being shocked by any of it
No. Please do not shut down discussion, anytime. This kills the open internet.
Mr. Mahesh made a comment about something that Comcast wanted to do was outlawed - which is essentially regulations. I think if India can quickly iterate and regulate with this new internet.org, that might be the solution to the problem.
And specially as there are more and more competitors that have much more to offer, such as Tsu. I am glad that their monopoly generating idea of internet.org is taking so much flak. I hope it continues, projects like these deserve to die.
the only way (& ambitious) I see is that for all the engineers at Facebook to say NO for this evil project
anyone with any sense of decency couldn't possibly agree to be involved in this evil project
Some way to communicate is better than no way to communicate.
This is not access to communication or information, it's access to frivolous distraction. Facebook has less bandwidth and more strings than traditional verbal and written communication.
In short, everything that the new TCP/IP landscape brought and many geeks loved at first sight. It's a very silly word, but it's useful, because you can't start every conversation by debating the value of decentralization. That way you can signal that you are not interested in the never ending conversation about emergency services and quality of service, and instead want to focus on what kind of service innovation a network of peers could bring.
Also, it's impossible to provide tangible proof for any opinion. My opinion is that Zuckerberg is a very bad person, and that is not a personal attack. A personal attack is never an opinion. Rather, personal attacks are when people have the intent of attacking to insult, to hurt, to throw wrenches into arguments, and so on.
Hacker News might disagree and appeal to their arbitrary rules about what's right and wrong, but to call my comment that "Zuckerberg is a very bad man" an assumption of malice, an unproven claim, or a personal attack is more of all three against myself than anything.
2. The guidelines essentially define uncivil as something you wouldn't say to someone's face. I would tell Zuckerberg to his face that I'm boycotting Facebook products over Internet.org and that he is a very bad man. That you consider my comment to be a personal attack - which I also disagree with - clashes with the definition stated in the guidelines.
I disagree emphatically with your claims and consider it a slight personal attack to suggest that I haven't read the guidelines.
Your statement "Zuckerberg is a very bad man" is both unsubstantive (because it's cartoonishly simplistic) and uncivil (because it's an absolute denunciation). It contains no information besides that you don't like Zuckerberg—which is very little information—and squanders it with vehemence.
The rules of civility don't suspend themselves when you're talking to or about someone whom you suspect of being bad. On the contrary, it's precisely for such situations that the rules exist. If you like someone and think they're good, you'll be nice naturally. It's when you dislike someone and think they're bad that you need the discipline to conduct yourself civilly, because like everyone else you owe that to the civic order.
Civility exists to prevent things like people jumping up with a knife at a medieval feast table. On HN the guidelines exist to prevent the internet forum equivalents.
I already said I would say these things to his face, so we're left with "gratuitous negativity". Gratuitous means "without apparent reason, cause, or justification". There's enough tangible evidence in the article and others related to the topic, namely from the creator of the World Wide Web, to suggest that my negativity is with reason, cause, and justification. Perhaps you disagree with that.
This seems like someone telling me to read guidelines for a second time and then chastising me when it's pointed out that the guidelines don't provide enough explicit justification for his or her accusations and statements. Either you're intentionally wasting my time or unintentionally wasting it as a result of presuming ignorance or failure to read. Again, this borders on a veiled, passive-aggressive personal attack, which you seem to be fine with.
If this is about being "cartoonishly simplistic", that's fine. I can censor my comments if that makes HN happy. In return for my willingness to censor myself, I request that HN raise the quality of its guidelines up from what many might consider cartoonishly simplistic to a level that is more robust and explicit. It's not a matter of making them exhaustive. It's a matter of them currently being ridiculously vague and thin. Some evidence for such a claim is in this thread of comments.
What you've ultimately confirmed is that HN's guidelines are so broad and brief that arbitration is in the eye of the moderator to such an extent to that its directives can be applied to almost any situation.
As such, I'm requesting you read the guidelines and please be civil. Your personal attacks are unacceptable. Thank you.