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Comment by retube | Hacker News Reader

As I understand it this effectively this stops "richer" people being charged more, which is being universally applauded as a good thing.

But isn't this contrary to the whole inequality issue? Shouldn't richer people be charged more? Richer people are being charged more for state infrastructure via higher taxes - which is also generally applauded as a good thing amongst the young/liberal demographic (in fact it doesn't go far enough many would argue).

So why is it bad for companies to charge more to certain demographics? If people are prepared to pay why's that wrong? Isn't value pricing actually intrinsically "fair" as richer customers are effectively subsiding poorer customers?

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On the issue TRAI said "In India, given that a majority of the population are yet to be connected to the internet, allowing service providers to define the nature of access would be equivalent of letting TSPs shape the users' internet experience. This can prove to be risky in the medium to long term as the knowledge and outlook of those users would be shaped only by the information made available through those select offerings."

The full explanation by TRAI is definitely worth reading, it talks about all the issues encompassing differential pricing, i.e., market distortion, information asymmetry, the natural of Internet and the special case of India. http://trai.gov.in/WriteReadData/WhatsNew/Documents/Regulati...

The internet is not "a product", it is an essential utility. Rich people pay more than poor people for roads, but they get the same access to them as poor people. This is what the internet should be like.

Historically, price differentiation for network infrastructure has been due to costs, not artificial market segmentation; it's important this continues to be the case for the majority of net citizens. As we've seen over and over again, removing cost barriers for utility infrastructure is a tremendous spark for all sorts of economic activity.

This is what the internet should be like.

The thing is: how does banning Free Basics / Internet.org provide that?

That's what bothers me about this movement: it should be about giving poor people free access to the Net (which would just render Facebook's toy platform irrelevant - no need to ban it).

Today a bunch of activists are celebrating victory, but tomorrow the poor will still have no Internet access. It's hard not to feel like these campaigns are little more than middle-class people patting themselves on the back.

This order makes no mention whatsoever of Free Basics. It merely bans price-based discrimination.

And there is no evidence whatsoever that Free Basics helps bring people online. Even Facebook was unable to find a single person who was new to the internet courtesy FBS. https://medium.com/backchannel/how-india-pierced-facebook-s-...

> That's what bothers me about this movement: it should be about giving poor people free access to the Net (which would just render Facebook's toy platform irrelevant - no need to ban it).

Give access to the whole Internet and not just few specific sites which a megacorp has full control over. The whole argument of something-is-better-than-nothing sounds so much like 18th century colonists. I just don't get why should Facebook be allowed to give so much power without them investing even a penny to improve the infrastructure.

Google's Project Loon is worth applauding, Free Basics is just a ploy to get the next billion users branded as a charity.

I don't disagree with anything you wrote, but I don't see how it addresses my point.

The point is that Free Basics existing would automatically remove a huge amount of incentive for other solutions appearing. Why bother building a better internet if FB already provides "the essentials" to everyone? It would wipe the market before it had a chance to develop organically as it happened elsewhere. If AOL had provided free access to its own services only we would have a very different network today.

The Internet market in India already has 300+ million users, and has been growing at a good pace. It's hardly an incipient market.

And besides, before AOL there was CompuServe (and Minitel, in France), which did provide access almost exclusively to its own services.

CompuServe never had the volume and appeal FB has today. Minitel is a good reference because it is widely credited as one of the reasons France initially experienced slow internet uptake.

> That's what bothers me about this movement: it should be about giving poor people free access to the Net (which would just render Facebook's toy platform irrelevant - no need to ban it). You are assuming that Free Basics is the only way poor people are getting connected. There are several more initiatives, funded both by the public and private. Banning Free Basics ensures that we don't differentiate internet based on an individual's affordability.

You are assuming that Free Basics is the only way poor people are getting connected. There are several more initiatives, funded both by the public and private.

No, I'm saying that the campaign has been against-Free-Basics and not pro-free-Internet. If there are such initiatives, good! Then nobody will have a reason to subscribe to Free Basics, and it'll fail anyway.

Banning Free Basics ensures that we don't differentiate internet based on an individual's affordability.

But if there are free plans with full Internet access, why is that important?

> but tomorrow the poor will still have no Internet access

That would still be the case if the verdict was the other way around. There's no evidence that Free Basics actually brought a significant number of new people on the internet (the rate of people cited as joining Free Basics is comparable to the rate of people joining the internet in general, so it didn't change anything)

Note that data plans are pretty cheap in India. The cost of a smartphone that can handle modern websites (especially Facebook, which breaks on old/slow phones and browsers) is more than the cost of a few year's worth of data.

That would still be the case if the verdict was the other way around.

That's my point: there's nothing to celebrate here, as nothing as changed. People without full Internet access still don't have it. And so, for what is the post thanking a lot of people?

> as nothing as changed.

It didn't get worse.

> People without full Internet access still don't have it. And so, for what is the post thanking a lot of people?

You can say that about anything. That's not what they're happy about; that wasn't the only issue on the table.

> Note that data plans are pretty cheap in India.

Cheap enough for the 60% of rural Indians who live on less than 35 Rs/day [1]?

> The cost of a smartphone that can handle modern websites (especially Facebook, which breaks on old/slow phones and browsers) is more than the cost of a few year's worth of data.

The vast majority of mobile phones in India are feature phones which are considerably cheaper than smartphones [2]. To be included in Free Basics, sites have to work reasonably on feature phones. Free Basics sites are accessed through a proxy which modifies requests so that the sites can tell that they are being viewed by a Free Basics user, and so the site can present a version that works without requiring "modern" features like JavaScript, SVG images and WOFF font types, iframes, video and large images, or Flash and Java applets.

[1] http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2012-05-04/news...

[2] http://www.igadgetsworld.com/india-smartphone-and-feature-ph...

> Cheap enough for the 60% of rural Indians who live on less than 35 Rs/day [1]?

Perhaps not; but I was including only people who can afford the phone.

> The vast majority of mobile phones in India are feature phones which are considerably cheaper than smartphones

They're still ~Rs 1k (you can get cheaper ones, but I don't think even proxied sites will work well on these). Monthly data plans are less than a tenth of this.

IIRC Free Basics' Facebook still needed a good phone (higher end feature phone or a smartphone), but I can't verify that right now.

And that really brings us back to the question; how is this bringing people to the Internet? Even if Facebook worked well on a Rs 400 phone, only the Free Basics sites would work well there. This just underlines that Facebook is trying to give people Free Facebook, nothing more. People who cannot afford these phones would not become "Digital Indians" by using Free Basics, they would use Facebook and only Facebook.

If that's the case, then let providers discriminate all they want, and have the government set up their own competition that does what they want.

I'm perfectly within my rights to buy up a bunch of land, and build a road on it, and only let rich people drive on it. There are plenty of examples, e.g. exclusive clubs and the like. I'm allowed to sell water at whatever price I want: but if I charge too much, cities will use someone else.

The government doesn't have a monopoly on roads, they just built the biggest one (perhaps with eminent domain), and therefore won the competition.

When there is an enforced government monopoly (e.g. post office), they tend to do poorly.

It's the other way around, let facebook build a separate, proprietary infrastructure for their service. I'm not sure if a real Private Network or a virtual PN would be the better comparison.

The government is not allowing that. They're banning differential pricing. Even if Facebook were to build their own network, they wouldn't be allowed to price discriminate based on websites visited.

Also, Facebook is not renting a government network, but a private network. That private network wants to partner with Facebook, but the government is stepping in and blocking it.

As it stands, the state, universities and other providers might have sponsored a lot of the infrastructure, while fb is just using it, so if they want their own, they should build it and only offer fb. for free.

If the state thinks it's a bad idea, they can not offer their own infrastructure to FB. That's not what happened. They decreed that nobody, even those who agree with FB, can rent their infrastructure to FB. That's the problem.

The state cannot not offer it's infrastructure to the private providers that are connected to the internet,

As you say, It's a problem, alright, but not actually mine, so I wont go anymore into this.

So in a truly free market how would people get to stores to buy products without roads or other means of transportation? Surely businesses, collectively, would pay for them.

Also, the internet is a conglomeration of things, so it's not really a product or a utility. I think comparing it to something like water or electricity is apples and oranges. What you want is easy, cheap access to the internet. I agree with you, but I'd like to see a voluntary solution.

>As I understand it this effectively this stops "richer" people being charged more

Price sensitivity != how rich you are

This was not about charging differently based on how much people have.

It was about charging differently based on WHAT you are using.

So, if I have much money, I can have my service freely for everyone, while this other startup, unless pays to internet providers, will be available over the paid internet.

> It was about charging differently based on WHAT you are using.

Sure - but what you use, and from where, is highly correlated with wealth

> Sure - but what you use, and from where, is highly correlated with wealth

Do you have an example of a case where sites rich people use were being priced higher? It's not enough to say "what you use is correlated with wealth" to support "this effectively this stops "richer" people being charged more", you need to show where websites being used by rich people were being charged for.

This does stop Facebook from giving Free Facebook (+ other services), agreed. Which is a service used by basically everyone.

> So why is it bad for companies to charge more to certain demographics?

Because that's poor allocation of resources and discriminatory (people are being treated differently for the same products). Paying more than the market value for a product means money is not being allocated elsewhere.

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