Facebook is talking to the White House about giving away ‘free’ Internet
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
edit: ok, "NSA Skinner box" may be a bit hyperbolic, but Facebook is still a PRISM participant that engages in emotional manipulation and ideological filtering, and they have a deeply vested interest in surveillance, profiling and correlating user data.
Why would anyone trust them to act as a gateway for the internet? Ever?
Wasn't Facebook caught scrubbing positive conservative news stories in the past? I could see secret deals between facebook and political parties regarding the consumers of their "free" internet.
Yes but it wasn't because of a secret deal (and would likely never be such). SF/SV just leans more liberal and its conservatives are generally libertarians. So, natural biases were likely the only cause and why pay for what you can get for free?
I think every Democrat would agree the GOP being killed off by the Libertarians would be a good thing simply because it narrows the scope to fighting over financial/economic issues and related civil rights issues. Rather than fighting over things like abortion and having the GOP quietly use building codes and other tricks to kill abortion clinics anyway.
Which is why they shouldn't be trusted as if they were a neutral party providing a utility - they're demonstrably not. Even if they intended to be, the temptation to wield the power they have towards some financial or political end would inevitably be too great to resist.
Not only is this not against the law, it's either illegal or highly discouraged not to do this everywhere in the world.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/everyt...
Shortly after, this happened: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/29/facebook-...
"Free" (gratis) will never be worth "free" (libre).
It's easy in a position of privilege (as the vast majority of HN'ers are), to say that it's an absolute wrong for FB to offer free internet (with whatever that entails).
But if you're a poor kid in a dead end community, and the only way you're going to get internet, and something that nears reliable access to information (whether it be learning to program or whatever) is through FB and their 'free' internet, you'd be jumping for the FB internet. It could offer you a unique opportunity to bootstrap yourself out of your situation.
It's similar to how you get free radio broadcasts, or free newspapers, or even free books. You can still learn and gain information from them, and they all have their bias and propaganda.
Freedom isn't a binary thing.
Do you know in this age anyone in USA who doesn't have access to the Internet and also would want it? I never met anyone, like that. I met people who don't have Internet (usually older people), but they are also not interested to have it.
Even if there are such people in US, they can get Internet access in library (together with free books and free newspapers), because surely they also won't be able to afford a computer.
Of course, due to the people I associate with, I don't know anybody without access to internet. But I knew quite a few people at school who didn't have access to internet at home.
There's a lot of parts of the world where there aren't libraries with publicly accessible computers.
Some Internet with strings is better than none. But, some types of Internet with strings is better than other types of Internet with strings.
I'm sure there are problems with this idea as I only just thought of it now but it already seems better than letting facebook provide the service.
edit, source: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/internet-org/platform-t...
Far better approach would be to remove laws that enforce duopoly, and allow individual cities to provide free (unrestricted) Internet access[1]. Once that's done we can think about providing free (price) service.
Otherwise we will always end up with crappy and expensive service.
[1] still allow private companies to use the infrastructure, but charge them to use it (to cover cost of maintaining it).
To be clear, Facebook is not offering free internet. It is offering "Free Basics", which includes specific services made to run on the platform. Most sites on the internet would be inaccessible through Free Basics.
I have an unlimited plan, actually unlimited, grandfathered in, and refuse to change it even though there are sometimes tempting deals, because I'm philosophically opposed to anything that breaks net neutrality, including getting free unlimited Spotify streaming.
So maybe "'free' 'internet'".
I'm not sure if it was something that our mobile providers paid for, or something that FB offered for free though.
Net neutrality aside, let's consider the image promoted by the company. It is brazenly false advertising. A product where the user is made to do useful work for the company should cannot possibly be free to that person.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2015/09/21/new-steps-deliver...
Seriously, is there anyone left who isn't fully aware this is just a ploy to create more lock-in and entrenchment, disguised as charity?
> In the wake of the uproar, Facebook updated its approach to Free Basics. It currently allows any third-party organization to offer its services as part of the program, provided that the organization's developers abide by terms that, for example, prohibit the use of high-definition images or video that could consume a great deal of mobile data.
So I took a look at https://developers.facebook.com/docs/internet-org/participat...
These jump out at me:
>Your site(s) may be proxied to make your content available through Free Basics. You can let us know that you want to pull your site(s) from Free Basics at any time, but because we may need to make product and marketing adjustments, we may require 60 days from receipt of your notice to transition gracefully.
>In order for your content to be proxied as described above, your URLs may be re-written and embedded content (like javascript and content originating from another domain) removed. In addition, secure content is not supported and may not load.
Then looking deeper at the technical guidelines: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/internet-org/platform-t...
>HTTPS support
>We encrypt information for Free Basics wherever possible. When people use the Free Basics Android app, their traffic is encrypted end-to-end unless you specify that your service should be HTTP only. For the Free Basics website in a mobile browser, we use a “dual certificate” model to encrypt traffic between a person's device and our servers in both directions. If your server supports HTTPS, we will also encrypt traffic between our servers and yours. Even if your service doesn't yet support HTTPS, where possible we will encrypt that information between our servers and people's devices unless you ask us to not use dual certificate HTTPS. 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.
So anybody using 'Free Basics' is giving Facebook full access to their encrypted data. That seems like significantly more than just the 'not using high-definition images or video' claim the article makes.
>Any data (e.g., proxy requests) or reporting we provide is deemed Facebook confidential information and cannot be used by you for any advertising purposes or shared with third parties.
Mean that facebook now owns your request logs and you can't share them with third parties?
It is hard to argue against free Netflix etc but the end goal of these activities is clearly to centralise the internet (targeting poorer / disadvantaged people first), and turn the internet into a modern television-like propaganda machine.
However I have no idea why Facebook should be the gatekeeper nor why Facebook or any large corporation should be on Free Basics.
Buying you directly would be "paying you for your time" or "paying you to pass a bill"
Buying you indirectly would be "paying your company for someone's time, they assign you" or "paying your campaign to curry favor with you".
In the first case, you get the money/benefit. In the second case, someone else gets the money/benefit.
More importantly, in the first case, you are doing a thing with a goal of a direct effect. I pay you, you write bill. In the second case, you are doing thing with a goal of an indirect effect. I donate to your campaign, i hope this makes you write bill i like.
You don't get to use your campaign money to buy a house or pay for your kid's education. In fact, depending, you may have to give it back :)
In any case, I don't see how you can call that "directly buying power". You are doing a thing, you are hoping it has some indirect effect.
FB: I give you money for fundraising, you approve bills that are good for me.
Congressman: OK.