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.
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).
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.
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.
edit, source: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/internet-org/platform-t...