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Comment by 0xmohit | Hacker News Reader

  While Google isn’t targeting those using its Wi-Fi with
  advertising, it’s aiming to get more people online and betting
  that they will use the company’s services and see more ads.

Essentially, Google is happy that those who would possibly never connect their phones to the Internet do that. (And, in the process, give it more data.)

  “If we don’t address it, a few generations of Indians will 
  feel left behind.”

Maybe it should also consider giving away free smartphones so that those not having one so that they don't feel left behind.

As a matter of fact, millions of Indians are left behind every year due to lack of education. Free education would help them much more than free wi-fi. (It wouldn't help Google, though.)

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I'm pretty sure it's more "increase the size of the market" than it is "give it more data". The latter is just a side effect of the former.

By getting more people online, they have more connected eyeballs for which advertising can be sold. It must be hard to sell adverts to Indian companies today when the target markets of those advertisers are not online (or not online enough).

It is fundamentally about growing the size of the pie, and everyone benefits from that (though yes, Google and other big internet companies perhaps benefit most).

> It must be hard to sell adverts to Indian companies today ...

Not aware of the state of affairs presently but until a couple of years ago, I used to run AdSense on a handful of India-centric sites and while there were a good number of advertisers, I almost never got anything more than a crappy 1 or 2 cents per click out of it. (By contrast, on several other sites with a global audience, I used to easily average 12 to 15 cents per click.)

I think this might be more a reflection of the income disparity between the Indian and the Western market. People have a lot more disposable income in the West, which allows them to actually purchase the things being advertised.

Yes, but one shouldn't say that the move is for the general upliftment or rather for the benefit of mankind at large.

It's obvious that the returns from these sorts of investment are much higher.

Why can't it be both? Frankly, the outrage seems disproportioned. Unlike Facebook with its Internet.org site, Google didn't even paint it as charity, they only said it's a problem that they (along with others) are addressing, which is what every companies does. "General upliftment" and "benefit of mankind at large" are your words.

I think providing free internet is a much smaller problem to solve than providing education. Google can just not do anything at all. So I'm glad they are providing this service (for now, at least).

Seems like a stretch to compare the choice of connecting 2 million people a month by offering wifi at 24 train stations to providing users that pass through the station with phones. More to the point, having a phone is not the issue, having a free way to connect to the net is.

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