It sounds like Facebook's approach is to provide free wifi to specific websites (which presumably includes Facebook) while Google's approach is to just provide free wifi. Is that true?
That's a lot more powerful, and a lot more expensive.
A huge percentage of India lives, works, and travels in areas that are unlikely to ever be reached by Google's wifi, but most of the country is now reached by at least one telecom.
EDIT: I did not mean to put Facebook forward as a hero; I wanted to explain the difference, and provide a hypothesis as to why it would be prohibitively expensive for Facebook to provide unfettered internet access in this case, but not for Google.
It's not more powerful when Zuck wanted to limit it to Facebook.com and whatever other sites he felt like allowing Indians to access. It was just insulting and that's why it went down in flames.
It would be like McDonalds offering to feed the hungry, but only if they exclusively ate McDonalds food. Yes they are hungry, but no they should not only be eating McDonalds food.
They use a "dual certificate" model, where they encrypt the data between readers and their own servers with their own certificate, and then access your website through your certificate.
They explain the process quite a bit when you try to submit a website to the Free Basics program. I went through the process to see how complicated it is (I got denied because I didn't want to get rid of SVGs and some JavaScript code from my website) and blogged about it here: https://blog.r3bl.me/en/why-not-everyone-can-get-involved-wi.... Pay attention the screenshot I posted under the HTTPS Support heading.
Please define "huge". Googling shows me that Google's wifi was setup at mass transit stations. Wikipedia says: " In 2014-15, IR carried 8.397 billion passengers annually or more than 23 million passengers a day "
23 million people a day is not a trivial number.
If people who use IR use it on average once every ten days (most may use it daily?), you'd project 230 million people would use IR in a year.
That's still only a fifth of the Indian population; I would call 80% a "huge" percentage.
Really, though, the point is that nobody spends much time at railway stations (at least, not a majority of their day), so even if everybody used the wifi once, it wouldn't have a major effect on their lives.
Compare that to 2G/3G, which blankets much larger swathes of land – places people actually live and work.
Telcos begrudge the cost of servicing the rural areas, and are concentrating a majority of their data dev to help metros.
The Facebook freebasic fiasco was also targetted at metros and young teens. They know which target markets would respond to free basic.
The high sounding promises were rhetoric - studies on who used the data showed that the market was users who used it to connect to other facebook users for free - college students.
Most of India is not educated in English, or literate - full internet which allows the sharing of images (not possible on FB) is significantly more useful.
In India, IRCTC (railways website) is used a lot. so having free connectivity on a train station is actually very useful. It may not be blanket coverage but it is practical, targetted and impactful coverage.
India needs more of that kind of work, because investment is slow and money hard to come by. Solving multiple use cases at one go with low resources is a great solution.
Thank you for putting the point across so nicely because this is the root of all the confusion.
Facebook was trying to serve a few sites via their platform.
In no way was it 3G or 2g which is full internet.
Free Basics was delivered over 2G/3G, instead of being delivered over wifi.
I am not defending Free Basics here.
Part of this is that people who have never been online before don't understand the value of getting online. This allows them to have some access in order to better understand the value. The model is a bit like the old shareware model DOOM used - give a few levels for free and if they like it they can pay for the rest.
The backlash was the argument that Zuckerberg was only giving access to a few websites (mostly Facebook) in order to get more control of the internet without following net neutrality. To me this seems to be an oversimplified and overly pessimistic view of what happened.
The telecoms are not going to just give free access of the entire web to everyone, but by giving access to some valuable websites for free people may start to see the value and demand better infrastructure/start paying for mobile internet. I think Zuckerberg is being earnest here and not attempting to manipulate people for some malicious power grab - this seemed like a good approach (unfortunately the PR fallout was not).
In comparison it looks like google is just setting up free wifi hotspots which requires you to go to one in order to use it and is generally a lot less useful.
The second one isn't and never has been a realistic option.
Would be interesting to see what people preferred if both had happened.
Aircel is one, I forgot the other.
Telecoms aren't giving out free internet access out of the goodness of their heart.
IIRC facebook wasn't even paying for the data in Free Basics (this may have changed?). They were spearheading/funding a marketing campaign, but the actual service was funded by telecom operators on the business model that a large enough fraction of people will switch to a paid plan. Facebook didn't even need to exist in this scheme (but nevertheless painted it as them being charitable)
I'm Indian – and if you are someone here who ordinarily can't afford any sort of Internet access, Facebook and the other e-commerce websites that were on the Free Basics platform weren't exactly the first things you'd want to access. They made zero effort to make things like government websites, local newspapers, utility websites etc. accessible through this platform. If they had done so, I bet they would have had a lot more support from the intended target audience of this platform.
Please note that they also were MITMing people's traffic using a dual-certificate model. [1] "When people use the Free Basics mobile website, information is temporarily decrypted on our secure servers to ensure proper functionality of the services and to avoid unexpected charges to people." This was part of the reason people were more pessimistic about it and viewed it as a way for Facebook to cheaply acquire a lot more users and a ton of free user data about them.
Google on the other hand seems to be basically giving unrestricted access, albeit at specific spots to whatever people want to access, which is (in my opinion) way better than the sort of AOL-style walled garden Facebook was trying to create in India.
[1] https://developers.facebook.com/docs/internet-org/platform-t...
The websites in Free Basics are websites that many people use all of the time. Though including utility type sites may have been the right call from a marketing perspective.
Not sure what the reasons were behind the MiTM - possible it was to prevent people using Free Basics to access everything by spoofing the domains and encrypting the traffic? Not everything is a conspiracy.
Definitely agree that access to everything is better, but wifi hotspots are nothing new and require you to actually go to them. Plus if you had Free Basics you could still use the wifi hotspots anyway - now those people have nothing.
If Chrome can include unique identifiers, what could one say of Android?
I say let the users decide with their feet and not some government bureaucrat.
Also regarding what Google is doing, the key difference is scale. Google Wifi will be limited and reach relatively few.
So I ask is it better to have a few people served with everything or is it better to give a little to everyone?
If the Indian government want to help their people they could focus more on stopping slavery rather than free internet access http://qz.com/695565/india-has-18-million-modern-slaves-at-l...
The Internet, as it stands, with some hiccups, allows anyone to put up a website and have the globe be able to access it. If you have to make deals with ISPs to allow their customers to see your content, or never be seen because nobody will pay for "the real Internet" as long as they have Facebook and Wikipedia and Amazon... the result of that is that the Internet becomes a means of commerce, not a means of communication. Another system by which companies and Governments and the rich can market to people, but people are silenced from criticizing them and building alternatives.
Stop twisting words - this isn't about "free Internet access", this is about free access to specific websites as chosen by the telecoms companies.
Don't forget that these are mostly 2G connections and so a full internet experience is likely to be a poor one. The limited services here are serving up lite versions of their products that should provide a better user experience on a 2G connection.
Honestly this model is not too different from what we had here in the US prior to iPhone. My Verizon phone had a very limited amount of Internet connectivity that was mostly restricted to Verizon's walled garden. I could pay for more connectivity but it was not a good experience. Pages were slow loading and the whole thing was more frustrating than anything else.
You can offer a lite version of any service on the public Internet, you don't need a free service tier.
I am very skeptical of a scenario in which people would find Internet important enough to upgrade to a paid plan. Quite likely, there would be a lot of free FB users who are content with limited Internet and that's the whole gist of the issue.
I don't think I am that old that I remember the time before the internet, and why the internet worked - and why it mattered so much. This argument is insidious.
I don't think I am that old that I remember the time before the internet, and why the internet worked - and why it mattered so much. The internet is not Wikipedia, or amazon or facebook. It is the substrate that allowed those systems to exist! Its what allowed geocities, ask jeeves, craigslist, dwarf fortress, ebay, kickstarter, watsi, cnn.com, wikileaks, irctc.com, pets.com, Bloomberg, google, optimizely, twitter, reddit and so many more to exist.
The internet is the system that enables any creator of content to access any consumer of content sans a gatekeeper.
That is fundamentally what the internet is about. I feel as if I am tip toeing around defining walled gardens and open internet.
FBasics is NOT the internet. It is categorically the opposite of what makes the internet work and why the internet is a force multiplier or worth passionately fighting for.
Side note: The top bureaucrat in TRAI is actually assessing the inputs provided in a clear technical process. Theres bureaucrats who are close to telecom who are pushing for freebasics. So if you want to know the truth, then you should also be ready to denounce Freebasics wholesale, the telcos are pushing to get middle man status via bureaucrats who are in the rank and file.
The NN people followed procedure, telcos are not. So its hard to take your particular accusations of Bureaucracy seriously
Yes, and therefore they will understand even less, the value of the whole Internet as opposed to selected sites. So it is misleading.
>The telecoms are not going to just give free access of the entire web to everyone, but by giving access to some valuable websites for free people may start to see the value and demand better infrastructure/start paying for mobile internet. I think Zuckerberg is being earnest here and not attempting to manipulate people for some malicious power grab - this seemed like a good approach (unfortunately the PR fallout was not).
This whole thing (internet.org / Free Basics) was discussed to death in the Indian tech and even mainstream media, and also a good amount on HN (and I'm sure plenty of other general Internet discussion sites) when the topic was more current.
The arguments of the people (many Indian) objecting to it boiled down to one thing: the telecoms / FB can easily give access to the whole Internet, not just their selected sites, but for a limited amount of bandwidth per month, e.g. 500 MB or 1 GB, for the same cost as their original plan, which discriminated against all other sites than their selected ones. Then why did they not try to do that?
As I understand it, that is the gist of the argument against internet.org.