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Comment by nippoo | Hacker News Reader

I've been amazed at the effects of this every time I've visited India. With data so cheap, social media use is prolific - people share videos and stream all day long - and public WiFi is far less commonplace since essentially /everybody/ owns phones with almost unlimited data plans.

India still has a long way to go in terms of social equality, poverty and breaking up the caste system, but providing fast, cheap Internet for all is undoubtedly a great first step.

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India is a remarkable success story in mobile data. A great deal of that success is due to Reliance Jio, who launched an LTE-only network in 2016 and totally disrupted the Indian market.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jio

... to the point of killing off nearly all other competitors. They are neatly poised if they now want to do monopoly-based price gouging, or create a walled dystopia.

Sounds a bit like Free in late-90s french internet which just set the entire market on fire (to the significant benefit of consumers).

Hopefully unlike free they don't become entrenched players resting on their laurels.

I used to have unlimited 512kbps "broadband" via public tel (BSNL, Phone line), up until 2013. I moved to delhi and as a broke university student, I'd gone through incremental upgrades with cable, fiber, wi-max connections, and have seen it stablise.

I moved out in 2017, but I'm glad for the LTE access that my parents can use from the same tiny city (with DSL Line, now at 1mbps as an alternative). It's great! Indeed, lots left to do about other issues, but I think we get to be happy about this particular development.

Sorry, But I have seen the opposite effect of cheap internet there. People spend lot of time in spread hatred, fake news and animosity using internet service.

I have seen this first hand with so many of my educated friends and relatives who were reasonable folks before internet boom and now they come across caricature of dimwit person. With so much information available on internet they still chose to pick lowest quality sources.

I don’t know why this is being downvoted. It’s the truth, except that it doesn’t happen just in India. Every country has their own version of this.

Not sure why you were downvoted because this is exactly what is going on. One might say that the problems were societal and already there - technology has just provided the bandwidth for explosive spread of these things. To be fair, it has also provided an amazing increase in outreach. A person in a village with barely any infrastructure can have a video call with their friends/family - that is empowering.

This might be true (it appears we have similar people in the western world). However, I think you're being downvoted because it seems you're advocating less internet access in the hopes of more equality.

It brings up an interesting question, though: Assuming for the moment that internet access actually increases hatred - is more hate towards a group a good tradeoff for empowering them by giving them internet access as well?

You are right. I could have worded differently to not imply that less internet is better. Point is that better internet connectivity lead to better social outcomes at large is wishful thinking.

That's not really an Internet issue, and more the idea that moderation of hateful content is "censorship". It would be the same in public if people couldn't be kicked off premises going on disruptive hateful rants.

This is actually true. The fake news is over the limits.

The elder generation believes some WhatsApp forwarded message so easily that WhatsApp and Facebook are political propaganda machines. Google about "Whatsapp University" meme. I honestly wish anything should not be allowed to be forwarded more than N times where N < 4. And I wouldn't care end to end encryption breaked on forwarded messages in order to fact check them.

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