Introducing the Internet.org App | Hacker News Reader

Introducing the Internet.org App

newsroom.fb.com

99 pointsdjug84 comments

> The Internet.org app will be available first to Airtel subscribers in Zambia and we’ll continue to improve the experience and roll it out to other parts of the world.

And by coincidence this is how net neutrality as a concept will not be a thing in Zambia going forward.

Screw you, Facebook. Your efforts to lock in the next few billion into an ecosystem controlled by you are utterly despicable. http://i.imgur.com/5RrWm.png

If you truly cared about doing something good, how about creating something like standardising a low bandwidth HTTP header? How about just channelling money into actual investments in infrastructure? How about working on multicasting information cheaply out instead of unicasting it to every single locked in member of your ecosystem? Why Wikipedia and not Urban Dictionary, Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg or GitHub?

Please let us know if you're going to be the winners and losers picker in the way I can see from the screenshots of your app so we may, and this may be a tad hyperbolic, prepare your very well deserved destruction. Who exactly elected Mr. Zuckerberg as Mr. "I decide what free (pun intended) speech is"?

It's unfortunate that 7 commercial entities have adopted the internet.org brand. When I read the headline, I assumed this was from the Internet Society, but they are http://www.internetsociety.org .

Anyone know which non-profit organizations have a governance role in internet.org?

Is there somewhere to complain about the domain name being an .org as this seems to be the opposite of the internet. Why don't they just give people 200Mb of free data if they really want to promote the internet. A better site name might be corpnet.com lockinnet.com.

Facebook.org would've been better.

Yea, smells like silo to me.

They're giving people something for free. It's hard to complain about that.

7 corporations get to decide what the word "internet" means or which books/sites are free? What about the other N-7 corporations in the world?

"Free" doesn't mean "good" necessarily. Drug dealers often give the first hit free (particularly to kids) to get them hooked.

There ain't no such thing as a free lunch

hi! welcome to the Internet! people can complain about EVERYTHING with ease. it's quite amusing from the right frame of reference

The optimist in me applauds Facebook for the effort to provide basic data access to the developing world.

The pessimist in me wonders if this is simply a brilliant strategy by Facebook to acquire the 4.5 billion people who aren't currently connected without having to compete with others. What's different between this and getting rid of net neutrality aside from side stepping the government entirely and doing it under the premise of helping the world become a better place?

The realist in me guesses that they probably see both sides and consider it a win/win scenario. I mean, wouldn't you?

>wouldn't you

No I wouldn't. I've hoped too many times that this kind of monopolist-but-beneficial scheme would work for the best, only to be consistently disappointed that the company behind it will use it only for its own interests when it's in a bad situation. And then everyone wonders "why did we let this happen?" Yeah...

Agreed, and questionable integrations like this feel connected to me: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/07/30/sprint-tries-a-facebo...

This is old but this is why I would never trust Facebook.. http://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-ims...

One of my sisters and her husband live in Zambia, where they do public health work. Specifically, he works on malaria[1], and one of the greatest challenges he faces is field data collection. Enabling everyone with a compatible phone to send in data would, I'm sure, be incredibly valuable.

I'm bummed that there aren't any public health tools included in this app. Hopefully they'll consider adding something like that in the future.

[1] Malaria affects almost 1/3 of the country's population annually: http://www.unicef.org/zambia/5109_8454.html

FactsForLife is included, doesn't that count as a public health tool? Not sure what you mean specifically, but this appears to at least educate around a lot of health topics. http://www.factsforlifeglobal.org/

I can see the value of data collection too though, but I think for a person accessing the internet for the first time, they would be more interested in gaining information than sending data about themselves into the void.

It also has Zambia ureport (zambiaureport.org), The ureport application itself is an SMS Counselling platform+polling+campaigning. What facebook is making available are the Frequently Asked Questions and answers.

...Am the developer on Zambia U-Report if anyone has any questions.

I guess it's official, Facebook isn't going anywhere and will continue to become more and more part of our lives. They're getting close to the level of Google (which I do trust with my data because they are transparent about most issues before people start asking them to be).

http://newsroom.fb.com/pages-directory/

http://newsroom.fb.com/resources-projects/

We can avoid Facebook all we want but one of these days there is going to be an app or product that's superior to all competitors and were going to be required to use our Facebook login, for many of us it's already happened.

I wish they would allow us to restrict what information was given to apps, whether or not the apps "required" it. I never login with Facebook but sometimes check the permissions it asks for, all friends, all info, etc are the norm. I don't want any service to have access to my list of friends, photos (that not even friends can see), and any app my friends have can access my information, I just don't trust the apps/services not to misuse the data or to have the data stolen.

I'm starting to trust Facebook a little more, but it's going to take time. I do trust Facebook more than some sites like LinkedIn, but that's not saying much, LinkedIn will never have my approval.

More open-source technologies (and services) and less requirements to "connect your Facebook profile" would go a long way in my opinion. Give users the option to connect Facebook and the adoption rate (and trust level) will be much greater.

How can you trust facebook? How a non net-neutral Internet is good for Zambia?

It's just clever marketing from facebook. Nothing else. Creating news costumers forced to use faceboook to keep his numbers high and growing.

Its shady privacy policy and unethical experiments (and don't forget the NSA collaboration) makes of Facebook one of the worst corporations out there.

I invite you to close your account.

You're probably right, I'm just giving them the benefit of the doubt, they have been trying very hard the past few years to recreate their image and implement privacy controls.

I saw recently one person talking about when you delete your Facebook account it's a true delete rather than a soft-delete, but I'm not sure how true that is, stuff like that goes a long way and matters to me.

> I'm just giving them the benefit of the doubt

You can't give them that benefit because their company culture was founded on "They trust me — dumb fucks" [0]

[0] http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg

This has got nothing to do with net-neutrality. Say my workplace internet has blocked porn, does that mean my workplace internet is non net-neutral and harmful ? On the contrary it is more productive.

When you are are getting something for free, someone else is spending money for you and clearly getting something for free is better that getting nothing.

In case of Comcast etc. this is not the case because these service providers use public land and create monopolies with the help of government.

A workplace is not a regulated Internet Service Provider.

Another word for "getting something for free" is price-dumping. History has many examples of this tactic being used to destroy competitors.

If someone wants to "sponsor" free traffic, they should be required to provide some percentage of that traffic for accessing the open internet, i.e. they cannot pay to remove choices from consumers.

Would it be ok to air-drop Go Language books in one country and Swift Language books in another country? Telecommunication and culture industries are regulated for good reasons.

Precisely Internet.org is also not regulated internet service provider. Price-dumping is a perfectly acceptable strategy.

Internet.org has contracts with regulated national telcos. The customers of those telcos do not have employment agreements with Internet.org's founding companies, i.e. they are not in a workplace relationship.

"They trust me — dumb fucks" - Mark Zuckerberg

While someone will come along and tell me he's changed so much since this comment and it's irrelevant at this point in time I still think it's foolish to place any trust in a company that was pretty much founded on this concept.

Interesting quote, I had to look up its validity. http://gawker.com/5636765/facebook-ceo-admits-to-calling-use...

I live happily the last couple of years without a facebook account and didn't stop from anything.

ps. I use my twitter handler for disqus and I have a G-account which I don't use much.

Same with me, I use Twitter login whenever possible, Google if no other option, Facebook login never or if absolutely forced to.

Twitter has been great, they focused on doing one thing really well.

I risk playing into the annoying stereotype (I quit Facebook and I can't stop telling everyone about it), I have felt an increased pull back to the service lately.

Not because I have any renewed interest in the site itself, but because more and more websites and apps using Facebook login as their primary registration/login mechanism (with some sites eschewing "register via email" completely).

A more egregious example is Stellar distributing free "money" to Facebook users. And not just any Facebook users, but Facebook users who are deemed sufficiently active, given some threshold on friend count or activity.

Giving Facebook reign over some official-sounding Internet.org portal is yet another attempt to entrench Facebook as a gatekeeper.

The utility of Facebook for consumers is no longer using the Facebook service itself -- which at its core was looking at friends' photos (Instagram & Snapchat do it better), reading status updates (Twitter is arguably better), checking into places (who cares), and viral casual games (mobile does it better) -- but rather using it as an identity service.

I'm uncomfortable with Facebook playing the role of the de facto online identity verification service, but that's where we're at.

I believe you can. This is how to do it retroactively http://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-adjust-app-and-web-site-pe...

I think there is an option for the same kind of control when approving an app as well (on the web at least)

Ah, nice. Those have definitely been improved since the last time I made a site that used Facebook login.

2 years ago it use to be a data-miners paradise, you could grab almost all users data plus all data that their friends shared with only friends, it seems like they've updated these privacy permissions as well.

Apps do still have access to photos that I'm tagged in that I've got hidden as best as I can tell is possible, not even Google has access to that information.

> I wish they would allow us to restrict what information was given to apps, whether or not the apps "required" it. I never login with Facebook but sometimes check the permissions it asks for, all friends, all info, etc are the norm. I don't want any service to have access to my list of friends, I just don't trust them not to misuse the data or to have the data stolen.

In the new API version announced at F8 this year (which will be required for all apps as of next summer) users can choose upon authorizing an app which permissions to provide, and friends' data is no longer included as it was before.

Google has a browser called Canary and this http://rt.com/usa/161192-google-facebook-microsoft-nsa-gag/ They have a new language called Dart -- Google's first ever reference to violence. They're nice people, but they've gotten a bit anxiety causing, not like they used to be (blame it on being a large company I guess, but don't forget to think).

Canary is just the name for their nightly release channel, it's been named that for several years. Most people should not use Canary because it's mainly for finding bugs before they get sent to the Dev channel.

I don't really associate Dart with violence when I hear the word, haven't even consider it until you mentioned it just now. Dart to me (other than just a random short word that was unused and sounds decent) means precision and fast moving.

While Google did have gag orders, they did a lot to actually notify users, there were popups that would only appear when users accounts were accessed by someone with unusual permissions, they were the first to provide a transparency report with the numbers of law-enforcement requests (had to use ranges to stay legal but still provide the information). As soon as they found out the NSA was tapping their datacenter fiber connections they started encrypting the traffic and had a press release about it soon after.

Yeah, a company as large and powerful as Google is going to have all intelligence agencies pressuring them for information constantly, the worst thing they could do would be being completely silent about it and deny everything, but they haven't done that.

They denied some stuff: https://news.yahoo.com/googles-ftp-nsa-really-better-direct-...

rubber stamp fisa kangaroo court meets google ftp, you could call that direct access.

> Google's first ever reference to violence.

This is a stretch. The name "dart" comes from the other meaning of the word, as in "an act of running somewhere suddenly and rapidly." Source: I work on languages at Google.

Wait. I don't understand. Why not just give people http?

They would get the wrong idea. Access to information should not be free, the internet as it happened to develop was a mistake. We must make sure we don't let the third-world make the same.

Meta: For anyone who didn't recognize it at first sight, this is sarcasm. Relevant such even if I and you don't necessarily agree.

(If you are about to downvote parent because he is wrong, read up on sarcasm and count to ten. If you happen to think it was more irrelavant or more out-of-place than most stuff here I can certainly see that, go ahead and downvote : )

PS: This comment really shouldn't be necessary but I have seen examples lately of people failing to not only appreciate well-placed sarcasm but also recognize it, as seen by the fact that they will start arguing how the parent comment is wrong. Sarcasm, well used, is^h^h used to be a very powerful technique because of the way it can expose the stupidity of something.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

There are plenty of powerful people seriously arguing that the free internet is a bad thing.

Because that would be killing the mobile internet market, which means the provider would ask for much, much more money in exchange.

In many countries, it could also be ruled as anti-competitive (dumping laws and such).

It's probably akin to Facebook Zero. Facebook isn't giving everyone free reign to access the internet; they're probably paying providers to deliver certain information that is pertinent and important. Health and weather information, for instance, is unbelievably liberating to a population without information.

Welcome to the Internet where you exist only if you beg the powers that be to include you in a list.

This is the first time in my life I see a "country" going from democracy to aristocracy.

It's going to take Amazon being added to a list like this before the rest of the Capitalists lose their minds over this.

* Where is the documentation about the methodology for selecting what apps are available?

* Why is Accuweather, a private company, offered top billing over other global wearther forecasting services?

* Why is Google given "Internet Search" billing over Bing or DuckDuckGo? What happens if a company in Zambia wants to create their own search engine? How can they penetrate a market?

I wasn't expecting the closed Internet to ramp up this quickly, but this is absolutely terrifying to me from a consumer and business viewpoint.

Net Neutrality issues aside (even though they scare me), it bothers me that they'd produce this in English as only 16% of the population speaks English.[0] A tiny percentage of Zambians claim English as their first language, what about the rest of the people who either don't have access to schools (where English is taught[1]) or don't have the level of comprehension required to navigate.

I would venture a guess that by filtering the numbers of English speakers by those who own mobile phones you'd jack up the percentage of English speakers, still.. this feels like it was designed more as a play to drive new users to sites than to genuinely get good information into the hands of those who need it.

Of course, I can't actually find the app anywhere, so if it were to come out that the app actually includes Bemba or Nyanja localizations.. I'd be taking a different tone. (FWIW, Facebook doesn't appear to support either [2])

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-sp...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Zambia

[2] https://www.facebook.com/translations/FacebookLocales.xml

Interesting timing considering Sprint just announced the Facebook plan for $12/month.

And internet.org reeks of imperialism in the worst way.

Yep, and all the hypocrisy...

Internet.org — Every one of us. Everywhere. Connected.

When the blatant truth is:

Internet.org — Every one of us. Everywhere. Connected. Through Facebook. Because we need MOAR users! To serve MOAR ads.

I don't know. I think its closer to the good ol' East India Company pushing Opium around the world. No one needs Facebook. It's addictive and warps a persons perspective of the world around them and their friends and family.

nicely put.

My perspective on this as I just said to someone:

It's an opportunity I wouldn't pass on I guess, but this is basically net neutrality in reverse.

When companies start deciding which websites are free and for which you pay the "normal" price, suddenly the normal price is extra.

</open-internet>

---

So yeah a Facebook app that offers Facebook access for free. How convenient, right? For good measure throw in another few services that look good but are still limited (google search without being able to click any links? Lovely) and we have something that we can present as a good thing to the world.

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

Wow. I feel deceived for thinking this was a good idea.

I mean, it is a good idea... but this link's relevance is troubling.

Facebook PR has the analytics benefit of a big database of human emotions. Much opportunity for fine tuning of messages :(

It's hard to have a clear perspective on this.

Obviously it's again net neutrality, and there are probably a lot of better ways to give access to Internet to people who don't have it. On the other end, I'd like to think it can be really useful to some people.

I regret however that the conditions and the process to be integrated to the app are not clearly stated.

For instance, it should be required that a service is accessible without restriction of any kind, and be interoperable... and Facebook Messenger doesn't meet these requirements.

Seems like a throwback to the days of the web portal (ala Yahoo.)

yes, like a mixture of:

* original The Microsoft Network (1994-1995) the MSN client that shipped with Win95 (instead of a web browser) that was meant as an alternative to the WWW; or similar limited portal services like America Online, CompuServe that are now obsolete

* portal websites with widgets like Yahoo, AltaVista, MSN (1996+)

* HTML5 web app store (btw. the Mozilla smartphone shown in the video already has an official Mozilla web app store)

I don't understand why is everyone here crying how evil this is. They are going to provide FREE Internet access to the basic websites and how that is a bad thing?

It's not free "internet" access. The "Internet" is the place where I can route arbitrary IP packets to any other host on the net. It is not 7 or 8 sites chosen by God speaking HTTP on port 80 (443 if you're lucky).

Because the only way this is free is in the immediate monetary sense, and they are using it as a wolf in sheep's clothing to push through their own shit.

They're effectively just pretending to be the 'good guys', in order to destroy net neutrality before it gets a chance.

I dont get the included Google Search. If you have limited sites where you can use the data, what's the use of searching the internet?

Wow, this is annoying. But, people should have access to the internet, so it's good I suppose. It really looks like someone's trying a new form of censorship. Here's hoping Google brings free speech to people (facebook is the king of sleezily building reputation). Also looks like facebook's trying to get rid of Google.

The internet.org website is down: http://www.isitdownrightnow.com/internet.org.html

  500 Internal Server Error

-- http://www.internet.org

Site is working here without a problem.

Internet.org was down for everyone two hours ago. I checked it also with isitdownrightnow.com and downforeveryoneorjustme.com. Probably the Reddit/Slashdot/HN effect or a DNS cache on their side.

It works fine now.

frik didn't pay the ISP ransom probably.

you want the internet to be widespread? Promote things like long-range wifi and mesh networks.

This is a great idea for Facebook! They're in the perfect position to have widespread adoption quickly and the service would be invaluable. Privacy would be key though, they'd have to opensource it and prove to people that it's secure and private.

Ideally Facebook would engineer itself out of existence, but I'm not holding my breath.

Won't happen, I've been waiting for them to become like MySpace but it just hasn't happened.

Facebook is the best at social media, there's no denying that. I would support them if they would have stayed small, simple, and private, but they kept adding, tracking, Sharing, Liking, Poking, etc.

Wireless mesh networks are not always feasible due to legal restrictions; see the discussion on the Gotenna article.

What a good way to do some social good whilst also opening up a new userbase that was not previously accessible.

With Facebook and FaceBook Messages both in the available applications, they get a foothold there ahead of their competitors.

Ah yes, because the very poor have a good disposable income.

If they want to privde Internet for everyone, why don't they use their money to fund, for example, DTN research? Ah right, then they couldn't collect every move the internet user makes onlne.

“Internet.org is a global partnership between technology leaders, nonprofits, local communities and experts…” - Which nonprofits? Not listed in the founding members.

Its nice to see , Indian Telecom giant "Airtel" is one of the partners of internet.org

Somalia has fast internet everywhere despite not having had a State for almost 20 years.

Despite?

I love how this is posted on facebook.com and not internet.org.

First Ebola, now Facebook.

this is anti net neutrality

It's funny how they describe the app as "providing a set of [...] basic services" and they include Facebook.

Not a basic service at all in my opinion.

(Also there is no Twitter, what a surprise !)

Agree or not but I have a very clear feeling that developing nations are not twitters demographic nor is it their target demographic.

Just think about it: Who are people following on twitter? Mostly not neigbours and general relatives. The only instances I have seen where twitter has helped people anywhere close to developing countries was during the revolts in Egypt and I have a a feeling even those reports where kind of inflated before they reached our tech bubble.

communication is a basic service (and human right!)

Are you implying that access to Facebook is a human right?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com