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I came from a third world country and internet was pretty expensive. For some reason, my provider made Facebook completely free. So in my free college days I used the Facebook developer echo API to make a HTTP proxy so I can browse internet for free. It was terrible, was only HTTP 1, so no web sockets, videos stopped randomly etc, but hey I could read Reddit.

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This is exactly the reason I love reading this site

What API is this? I am curious as to what this API was meant to be used for.

Same story here. Data was so expensive and Airtel let users open airtel.in etc at Zero balance. We used to use all kinds of Opera and UC "Handler Mods" with custom HTTP headers like Host or X-Online-Host to fool the ISP. First on Nokia s40 and Symbain and later on Android. Someone made a Handler Mod of pshipon VPN and man, it was slow but so cool. And then Jio happened!

Any chance you could share that? I think some flights still don't charge for Facebook messenger, so HTTP over messenger might still be useful.

Less technically knowledgeable people would probably do something similar, using Facebook as an even slower (and lossier) "layer 8 proxy" as opposed to your "layer 7 proxy".

It would also be a decent anti-tracking mechanism.

May I ask which country?

There are a lot of countries where Facebook is “free”, for example India and Philippines.

I'm guessing that in these countries the cost of Internet traffic is dominated by the undersea cables at their borders.

Facebook has been paying to have new undersea cables laid. This is done as part of a consortium, but those cables only have 6-12 strands in them (the repeaters are bulky) so owning even just one whole strand of fiber in an undersea cable is still an obscene amount of bandwidth for a single company that isn't in the business of reselling bandwidth.

In The Philippines, my understanding is that they have ample bandwidth via Korea and other countries in the region. But the reason they have such expensive terrible internet is because of a lack of net neutrality and deregulation.

The cellphone duopoly sells "YouTube passes", that entitle you to get unthrottled YouTube for brief periods of time.

I wonder if a proxy could be made to encode data as video to put in a YouTube livestream. You'd still need an uplink but the upload bandwidth usage is a fraction of the download one for typical Internet usage.

Yes, that is definitely possible and might make for a fun project. Use stego to make the livestream look innocuous and apply heavy ECC, further resisting censorship and arousal of suspicion. I think this is the closest I've seen to a public implementation of that idea: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12166332

You'd still need an uplink but the upload bandwidth usage is a fraction of the download one for typical Internet usage.

Perhaps the chat/comments (once again with heavy stego/encryption) would work?

Related and older idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArVid

Net neutrality isn’t related to Internet speeds. Good speeds are just driven by having competition.

Comcast was suddenly able to provide 1gbps for the same price as an 80mbps package when a fiber competitor entered the market.

Even with net neutrality, there is no incentive to make the internet better as an operator if you’re operating in a government granted monopoly/duopoly market.

Net neutrality eliminates the ability of an operator to discriminate and offer uncapped data or higher speed passes to just YouTube.

> the cost of Internet traffic is dominated by the undersea cables at their borders.

This is rarely the case. It's usually monopoly providers and/or people speaking historically when it was expensive because it was rarer.

India and the Philippines both have more than adequate international bandwidth.

Free Basics was not allowed in India by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India[0]. The list of countries where Free Basics is currently operated is listed on Internet.org website[1].

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2016/2/8/10913398/free-basics-india...

[1] https://info.internet.org/en/story/where-weve-launched/

Indeed, I must have confused it with Bangladesh, I visited both in the same month. Thanks for linking to the actual list.

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