The web has been so successful because of any one of us can fire up a text editor and create the next phenomenon without spending a single dollar or seeking anyone's permission.
This is not charity, it is a coup d'état.
The Net Neutrality activists of India, are bunch of middle class disconnected from poor activists. They think their idealogical purity is paramount than a dirty limited connection for the poor.
I am afraid populism will one more time win the day, while NN activists take a victory lap, the India's poor now will not have any form of connectivity.
I promise you that in this sort of Internet, Facebook would have had an even more uphill contest against MySpace. Mark should let Indians have the same Internet he had.
As for why there’s no turning back: for most of the internet’s history we’ve had ‘de facto’ net neutrality so we can codify the regulations without disruption. As soon as ISPs get habituated to pricing usage based on the app, it will be difficult to put the genie back in the bottle.
2) There are free VPNs out there. I am not sure how trustworthy they are, but people I know have been using them for ages.
Which is why you are free to take your business to another ISP that does no such shenanigans.
No it doesn't. There used to be free WhatsApp + Facebook/Twitter access over 3G/GSM here in Brazil for a year or so, NOTHING changed, except the poor could communicate with their friends for free and people spent less. Then came net neutrality* and now people have to pay to STILL only use social networks to communicate, like they did before the free plans and like they'll keep doing. Get a bus here and all you see people doing is chatting via WhatsApp or Messenger, even though they can access whatever they want for the same price.
As some other commenter mentioned, NN crusaders frequently seem like people who can afford data plans and have no contact with reality on a moral crusade about something they have no idea how it would or wouldn't work IRL.
* there are still some plans where you get "free WhatsApp", but you have to pay for the plan itself and the "free Whatsapp" part has something to do with your data cap ending and still being able to use services with low bandwidth.
1) I understand that people want free WhatsApp (etc), but I can't base internet policy on crowning WhatsApp as a free service. Indeed my whole position is that ISPs should not price-discriminate based on apps.
2) The fact that people used WhatsApp, Facebook & Twitter when they were zero-rated and continued to do so even when they are paid doesn't detract from my point about zero-rating being a unique advantage, quite the opposite.
3) Picking three services with strong network effects over the course of a few years is not what I meant about the fundamental nature of the internet. The point is that before WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter got popular, during their early growth, these apps and their users benefited from net neutrality. If apps become zero-rated over the long term their incumbency changes the nature of the internet from the state it was in when they were released.
AOL and CompuServe are good counter-points.
Once the poor have some access to social media - it will automatically generate demand for more and better services.
Labeling someone who disagrees with you as being in an "ivory tower" is basically an ad-hominem. Argue the merits, not the source.
> the facts on the ground are 80% of Indians do not have internet access. You sometimes have to try "impure" methods. The question is still up in the air, whether FB Basics is gateway to full internet or if it is a walled garden. Either way, it is better than No Access.
What if a pharma company came and said, "you know, this medicine causes birth defects, but it's OK to push it on Indians because 80% lack decent medication"... would you be for it?
India is making tremendous progress in bringing connectivity to the people. I grew up in an India where telephones were so scarce, that the waiting list for a landline phone was more than 10 years. People in villages had absolutely no access to phones at all; reaching a phone meant taking a bus/train to the nearest big town, and going to a PCO.
And yet today, almost everyone has a cellphone.
By pushing this "walled garden" to the people, FB will capture the market and derail the train of progress. FB has the ability to pay local carriers; but does HN?
On other note, there are desperate patients and families who are willing to risk their health and are trying hard to get access to drugs that are in clinical trails even in OECD countries.
This is the whole net neutrality issue. No net neutrality, no internet.
Facebook can decide to do what it wants,but this type of spending on propaganda trying to change the policy in India is not acceptable and maybe not even legal. Not sure,but would it be allowed for an Indian company to take out full page ads in NYT against the raise in H1B visa fees?
There are full page ads in India for all sorts of things. Damn, if shell enough money, they would put a full page ad about my post in Hacker News. NYT and WaPo are in a different ball park, but they too at times are open to full page ads, what is illegal about that?
With some quite interesting results and consequences[1], you can't just drop a big bunch of monies on soomething expect it to solve itself or be successful.
I've followed India's cellular revolution with interest, seeing (as I mentioned earlier) I grew up when India had almost no phones. My dad, due to his work, always had a phone; and I, being the youngest, was the errand-boy, running to distant houses to tell people that there was a phone call for them, and that the caller would call back in 20 minutes, so please can you come quickly?
The reason cellphones took off in India is that the government tried (some would say, not hard enough) to level the playing field and to remove barriers. What if you could make calls on Reliance to only Reliance folks? Or what if Airtel charged you Rs. 20/min for calls to Docomo, but Rs 1/min to calls on Airtel? This kind of balkanization would be disastrous to the cellphone users.
Similarly, if you want internet use to spread, you cannot do that by placing barriers and toll gates all around. It has to be unfettered access. Sure, this "basics" thing may be available right _now_ ; but users will then be locked into one mode of operation forever.
People who are arguing against FB are not just "intellectuals"; but people who have a lot of experience. I, for one, remember when the first Internet line to India was hooked up: it was a 56K modem, a Trailblazer. For the entire country of India. From there, we have come to terabits/sec fibre lines. So yes, I do know something about the Internet.
What if Facebook gave everybody in India free phones and free calling, even if it was only on Facebook phones? Would anyone have to be the errand boy for their neighbors' calls?
I don't see how your experience where most could not afford any access (let alone restricted access) to basic telephony applies to this scenario where a restricted service is being given for free.
(I also spent my childhood vacations in rural areas where our house was the only one with a phone for miles around. And even then they would trouble us only for issues of some urgency. I have a hard time believing any of the people who'd walk all the way over would prefer doing that over getting a free but restricted phone service.)
You're missing the point completely. My point is: we are on the path to progress. It's going the right way for the future of the people. But Facebook wants to derail it and lock you into their ecosystem. In the long run, this is detrimental for everyone.
People who are here, posting for FB, obviously have internet freedom; so what they're basically saying is, the poor should not have the same freedoms that I am enjoying.
Overall, it has not caused any major disasters.
The ivory tower comment which you complained about up-thread read to me as "this is a possible cognitive mistake we might make, let us avoid it" (note that it used the word "us").
On the other hand, there is no charitable reading of the first line of your comment. It's just nasty, much nastier than the even the worst reading of the ivory-tower comment.
>:(
In the US an analogy that I can think of is obamacare, where everybody was forced to pay a certain amount of money as TAX so that the whole country is insured.... I dont see the same argument here.
It's not always ad-hominem. It might seem so because of the obvious tone used but at certain times it could just be that the context that a person is coming from could have a really significant impact on his reasoning (for or against).
If you replace "birth defects" (which imply a complicated moral issue of mother vs baby) with "nasty side effects", and assume that without this medication 80% of population would suffer a fate objectively worse than these side-effects (like loss of hearing vs death) — why the hell not?
Ad hominem attacks have been and always will be useful tools in debates.
Example: If you are rich and believe that the poor are lazy and always asking for handouts, it would be beneficial for someone to make an ad hominem attack towards your character and background as a wealthy person to help you see why your statements are biased.
Is that what you want to believe or can you back it up ? I think your statement couldn't be further from the truth.
I see this as a false dilemma. Internet access in India is already cheap enough to be near the cost of a phone over its effective lifetime. To quote the linked post:
> Given that data packages cost as little as Rs. 20 a month while phones cost Rs. 2,000 and up, we think their thesis itself is flawed
So the group that free basics can help to get online are those for whom the cost of a phone is feasible but paying the cost of a phone ×2 or ×3 for internet access is not. This is a relatively narrow fraction of the population.
Activists in India see that there are other reasonable alternatives to connect the entire population of the country that do not encourage the digital enslavement of their poor. The simplest one is a marginal improvement of per capita income that is driven by the people of the country itself, not exploitative "charity" from a foreign company. In very short order this, and the decreasing cost of technology will allow the whole net to reach everyone who could benefit today from free basics.
The false dilemma "better this than nothing" comes from a distant ivory tower that does not respect the capacity and future of the people of these developing nations. There are other ways to full access that do not sacrifice human rights.
Indians are very frugal, if they bought the phone, then that's the end of it. They won't even spend a single penny to buy the Internet.. Only way is to give it for free and let them experience the usefulness and long term effect.
How to give for free? That's up for debate.
I think it's a gateway to popularising tunneling; as long as FB lets those using FB Basics and those accessing FB from the full Internet communicate, you can still send information through. It's just like using FB as a proxy. Given that and what I know about Indian ingenuity, I predict a lot more hacks like this will appear:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9203946
So I suppose in some respects you could think of FB Basics as a very heavily throttled full Internet connection. You could even argue that FB and all the other companies giving "free" non-net-neutral access is driving incentive to hack around these restrictions, which I think is not at all a bad thing.
There are better ways of giving out Internet for free. By giving out slower internet. Or internet with a free data cap. Or a way of "earning" Internet data after watching some ads (see: Grameenphone in Bangladesh). I'd somewhat agree with the "Some Internet is better than No internet" argument, except that there are better ways of doing the "some Internet" which Facebook isn't doing.
> why not facebook provide free internet access to poor.
Facebook isn't even paying for the data in Free Basics. The telecom operators are (I assume their business plan is to get more people hooked onto the Internet so eventually more customers for them. A valid plan.). They can use the same business plan (in a net neutral way) for the slower internet or internet with a data cap options; and I believe that's what Aircel is doing.
(Aside: When you look at it this way it becomes even more obvious how devious Facebook is here -- without putting in money of their own to finance the actual data, they, a third party, jumped in and convinced telecom operators to enact a scheme which Facebook has a lot of control over despite not being the primary financers of the scheme. They get lots of credit and lots of control, without actually doing anything. When framed this way the parallels with the Brits' takeover of India seem a lot more real.)
And really, the "no access" part of your argument isn't really well founded either. For most, data plan costs aren't the barrier to internet access (in fact, a smartphone capable of working with the modern internet[1] is more expensive than a few years' worth of basic data).
[1]: Fun fact: Facebook's mobile app evolves pretty fast and becomes unusable on older phones either due to browser compatibility, OS compatibility, or speed issues. Same with many other sites and apps.
They already support a truckload of configurations as it is.
(Also, for many low-end phones, updates come infrequently and OS updates are not always easy to install)
A network paid for by foreign business interests and advertisers is fundamentally different than a network paid for by its users. But even though the foundation is different, they are in many ways substitute goods, meaning the presence of one will inhibit the popularity of the other. By the most basic economic reasoning, Free Basics will hurt the spread of user-funded peer-to-peer networks like the internet, just as distributing free clothing will hurt a local textile industry.
Based on that model, we can also predict the more fundamental difference between the two networks to be in the details w.r.t. privacy interests, not limited access.
When facebook offers "free internet," whatever benefits it provides, the cost is hidden and built in elsewhere in Facebook's business model. Which means such a free internet that facebook is supposedly altruistically providing is actually being paid for elsewhere, whether in higher ad costs for India or some other area of their business.
This means facebook is essentially skirting net neutrality by indrectly paying for people to only have access to Facebook.
This is on top of anticompetitiveness of the move. Giving anything away for free destroys natural competition in the ecosystem. See the case of TOM's shoes giving away free shoes and destroying local shoemakers.[1]
Their tactics here makes it justifiable for a country like China to block Facebook. Imagine if Facebook took over China, and started blasting political messages with ulterior motives to 2+ billion people, trying to influence them for corporate gain.
[1] http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2014/10/economic...
Competition is good, but Facebook has the power to completely destroy and monopolize local industries if unchecked (in less developed economies at least).
The facts on the ground for everywhere in the world not too long ago was worse than 20% access to the Internet. And I bet the current 20% Indian Internet users have much much faster connections than dial-up.
Things change. Fast. It is disingenuous to ignore the natural connectivity growth trajectory and focus on today's number only. Most will get connected to the Internet, with or without Facebook's "help" soon. The danger is with Facebook's "help", they'll get connected to FBNet (Free Basics Network, aka ZuckNet), diverting them away from connecting to the real Internet.
Oh wait...
"Internet use in Cambodia grew a staggering 414 per cent since January 2014"
http://www.phnompenhpost.com/cambodians-flock-net
It's exciting to see. Most people in Phnom Penh have a smart phone, and I meet more and more full-fledged computer nerds and Cambodian programmers all the time. I have no doubt that Cambodia will be fully connected within 5 or max 10 years, without the "help" of Facebook.