Google Free Zone - Share and search on your phone with no data charges
google.com.ph
google.com.ph
When you click on a link in the search results page, you don’t pay anything. If you click on a link after this, you will need to pay for this data usage (but don’t worry, before you are charged, you will see a warning page with the option to sign up for a data plan if you want.) So for example, if you click on a search link to a Wikipedia article, you won’t pay anything. But if you click on a link within the article, you will be charged for the data costs incurred loading that link.
That part is a really interesting. As the old saying goes, the first hit is always free! It's freemium for data plans.
I wonder if the phone operators are keen on this because it's a way to get people who were previously hesistant onto data plans.
https://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...
Tried it in the Philippines and it works well. One possible problem here is that for smartphones, users may be charged unexpectedly because background apps that access the net. There should be a separate APN for Free Zone use so users are sure they are not charged for normal data rates. I don't think users will use this if they are uncertain that it is totally free.
Hope Smart would support it also
It seems like the mobile carriers are footing the bill for this one. Or, for now, one mobile carrier in the Philippines. It looked like it still costs money for 99.5% of all mobile internet users.
I think this bodes very badly for the internet. We need to maintain a model where:
1) I pay for access 2) I access whatever sites I want
If anyone but me pays for my access, they're going to want to make back room deals, make favored sites faster, make sites they don't like inaccessible, and generally destroy the level playing field of the internet.
This is a first step. "Let's search for that on DuckDuckGo." "No, that costs money. Google is free." Boom, innovation stamped out.
http://qz.com/5180/facebooks-plan-to-find-its-next-billion-u...
1. Free Zone users can access their favorite Google communication tool (G+ / Gmail) and search. 2. Google gets to serve its ads on all these properties, apart from valuable usage data and improving its products (the more people search on Google, the better its results, etc). 3. Carriers have two obvious benefits – acquisition and/or retention of price sensitive users seeking free access to G+/Gmail/Google Search and acquiring users for data plans. Another benefit could be revenue sharing for lead generation via Google’s ads. The wild card with the carriers is to launch sponsored browsing as a product – where anyone could sponsor access to one/more web services. 4. Advertisers have a compelling incentive to allocate budgets for Google’s Ad Words product. 5. SEO wars will be taken to a new level. 6. The days of feature phones with no internet access could be numbered. In the optimistic (for Google) scenario, Free Zone will increase demand for low end internet enabled phones. And OEM’s will gleefully comply.
Note - Extracted from my blog: http://u2697.wordpress.com/2012/11/08/sponsored-browsing-and...
If you mean "specific operators in one country", then name them.
If you saying "mobile operators" while meaning "<1% of all mobile operators" - that is simply lying. Well, 99% lying and 1% truth.
1. The offering is carrier specific and the language suggests that even if this were expanded to other countries, you can only use it from home. 2. Two-factor authentication isn't supported, which most of us are probably using. 3. You may be getting charged for data by services running in the background.
And, of course, the expanding concept of free access to certain sites only serves to help make people think that sort of thing should be ok.