Comment by tombrossman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tombrossman | Hacker News Reader

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Remember that for some users Facebook effectively is the Internet. They have a normal broadband connection in a relatively affluent western country but spend much of their time online using Facebook for browsing and two-way communication with other Facebook users.

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?

Sure, some people may spend most of their time on Facebook, but it doesn't mean it is all of their time.

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.

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