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Comment by yggydrasily | Hacker News Reader

Zuckerberg is the new Bill Gates. In the 90s, Gates was notorious in his ruthlessness to define personal computing as a 100% Microsoft-only experience. Today, as you pointed out, Zuckerberg is pushing equally hard at defining the internet and Facebook to be one and the same. In both cases, it doesn't really matter whether or not the efforts are sincere. The outcome is just as undesirable for the general public either way.

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Microsoft was in a class by themselves in terms of how their ruthlessness played out. Harsh negotiation demands plus technical bullshit like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code

I haven't heard stories like this about Facebook, but perhaps they're better at covering their tracks.

Walmart was in the same class

I'm sure you're right, but I'm curious -- in what ways?

All successful companies are part of the class, visible or not.

They did their best to kill Linux:

- Negotiation and "arrangements" with OEMs that they will only pre-install Windows on all devices.

- Allowing "selective piracy" to happen so the masses are addicted only to Windows, while they still earn from corporate clients.

- Making Word/Excel formats not compatible with ODF (Open Document Format), thus making it difficult for OpenOffice/LibreOffice to function.

If I think about it, it seems like a wonder that I even have Linux running on my laptop today!

What Facebook is trying to do is completely different... you were always able to use non-microsoft products/programs on Windows or browse non-microsoft websites... what Facebook is trying to do is much worst (probably evil).

You could also view it as not too different. Windows wanted to be the platform under everything. Now Facebook wants to be the platform under everything, and content/apps will have to go through Facebook (look at the direct publishing stuff they're already doing).

But the big difference is: you could reverse engineer Microsoft Windows to do what you want beyond the APIs provided but you can't reverse engineer Facebook because you don't have the code running on your machine.

You don't have to go through Microsoft to publish Windows apps... not sure if it changed with Windows 10 though... but of course they are trying to change that to be like Android and iOS and get complete control.

Windows 10 for PCs offers the store but does not require you to publish through it.

For now, anyway.

Zuckerberg is the new Zuckerberg! What's up with all these comparisons? You are trying to make one man into another man, they are different men, with different things going through their heads, stop it.

It almost paints a picture of the old AOL and MSN services where you entered some corporation's version of the internet.

I've found that using AOL to make this analogy is helpful in explaining the issues with free basics (and net neutrality in general) to non-technical folks. For example, many people have experience with parents who think the only way to receive their email is by logging in through AOL's desktop application, installed on their Windows computer.

I don't understand what the fuss is over this. Using your analogy, if AOL were legitimately free to non-technical folks, it would be worth it for many of them to have their curated/locked in ecosystem. I can't help but feel the hate for freebasics is an example of the privileged declaring what's best for the unprivileged.

If those opposing the FreeBasics are trying to decide on behalf of poor, isn't FreeBasics itself not doing the same thing?

In fact the word play now is just ridiculous. When questioned about the above, they point out that this is an open platform now where any service can come in. When questioned on why not simply give free capped bandwidth then, the answer is that "basic internet services" like education, health are more important for poor. And if left to themselves, they will spend all bandwidth on things like porn. (The last statement is not from Facebook but from certain supporters of FreeBasics)

I'm not exactly sure what the problem is. Ultimately the target user can choose from whatever options are available to them (apparently freebasics or nothing right now). For a free service there certainly is a limited amount of bandwidth available. It makes sense to ensure that the maximum amount of users get the maximum utility from it, which means preventing the bandwidth sink that porn will be.

Textual porn, at least, is not a significant bandwidth sink...

> If those opposing the FreeBasics are trying to decide on behalf of poor, isn't FreeBasics itself not doing the same thing?

No, not really. It's giving them an option, and they can decide for themselves.

The way that story played out is that people hooked on AOL validated the concept and paved the way for broadband and Web as we know it, so not sure how it's illustrative of the issues with Internet.org.

That's a fair point. Another way that it played out is that people like my parents were under the impression they still had to pay $9.99/month for AOL email as recently as like 2 years ago.

Actually, there's no reason to believe that his effort is sincere. His main company has a pretty bad track record of being sincere or upfront about anything it has ever done. Many on HN are sympathetic to him because he seems to be like us but he isn't. Like you said: he is more like 90s Bill Gates than he is like any of us.

Why do you think many of us are not like 90s Bill Gates?

Let's just grab our wikipedia archive and get off the net; it has been going downhill for a while now.

Time to detach.

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