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Comment by shk | Hacker News Reader

Feature phones are still the reality in a large swathe of rural India. Cheaper android phones will definitely help change that situation. I wished that android one phones came with free 2-3 months of 2G packs so that millions of people could have their first taste of 'Internet'.

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>millions of people could have their first taste of 'Internet'.

Eternal September 4.0?

Had to lookup that reference. For others - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

However, what events do 2.0 and 3.0 refer to?

It's just my rough mental approximation of how many times such a situation has already happened (even if Usenet is to all intents and purposes dying/dead, it still applies to the internet as a whole).

Imagine a billion people with poor to no English and no previous experience of concepts even similar to the internet all gaining access at once.

Well, you don't have to know English to use the Internet.

If people who don't speak English get onto the Internet in droves, I would imagine they would flock to sites catering to their language, until the point where they learn enough English to join the English speaking parts (assuming they have interest in learning English, which they may not).

The Internet does have sites dedicated to other languages. I frequent reddit.com/r/de, which is reddit but completely in German.

I agree, but they probably won't go to Reddit :)

In Argentina and Uruguay we have some local communities, such as Taringa! (spanish-language community)

There's probably one or several equivalents in the locals' language :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taringa!