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Comment by Liquix | Hacker News Reader

To me, the worst part of this is that there are places where Facebook is free but you need to pay for an internet connection. If the average user can only access the mindless corporate money-making machines and not the real internet, we are moving in the wrong direction.

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They went from having no free internet to having Free facebook + other core sites like wikipedia through Facebook's internet.org, but it's moving in the wrong direction?

>If the average user can only access the mindless corporate money-making machines and not the real internet

They can, but it's not free, and a lot of people have no other option but to use what is free. This corporate money-making machine just provided pure value to a ton of people, there's no downside to having this additional option available.

there's no downside to having this additional option available.

Sure there's a lot of value in communicating with other Facebook users, but if you can't see the possible downside of having a large group of people's first and only connection being through a corporate-controlled view of the world, you're not using your imagination.

Can you actually make the argument that access to Facebook/Wikipedia/etc is worse than no Internet whatsoever?

Yes, absolutely, and it's not a new idea, e.g. "sending shirts destroys local textile economies by flooding the market with free goods and undercutting local t-shirt producers" [1].

1. http://freakonomics.com/2011/02/15/what-happens-to-all-those...

This allows those communities to dedicate resources that would have gone towards shirt manufacturing into something more valueable. Textile economies are a mostly waste of human ingenuity and time, and have been since the Jacquard Loom at least.

Within our lifetimes, this reasoning will apply to more professions than you might think. "Dignity is more important than wealth" and all...

Wouldn't it prevent people interested in creating an ISP in any area that has "free" facebooknet? Especially if the services provided by facebooknet is most of which people would want with an ISP anyway?

So not only does it prevent competitor websites, but it stops competitive ISPs, too. It's especially bad if this coporate network is censoring information. No opportunity to even discover non-filtered information outside the info bubble. This triple whammy is the consequence for those involved or not.

Are those competitive ISPs going to give the audience we're talking about access to the net for free as well? Because for a lot of people in this world, they will never be connected to the net unless they don't have to pay; they simply can't afford it.

That's why we need government or non-profit programs, giving general access to the net. Because only then it is a level playing field, and the next Facebook can be from Brasil.

This is only an intentional effort to control and shut out competition (e.g. future Facebook competitors) and has the risk of killing local ISPs as a by-product.

tl;dr It only serves Facebook. Wikipedia et al. are just thrown into the mix to make it look like a humanitarian effort.

Why would they need to be "free?" Not everyone needs personal internet to benefit from a free (as in freedom) internet being available in their area. Unfiltered information spreading in a community is almost guaranteed if it exists.

How on earth are we going to get them innovative/affordable internet solutions if no one can compete to get there?

It would be somewhat contrived, but you could argue that the shown ability of Facebook to influence the moods of a population via filtering content could be used to oppress underprivileged people.

Free Facebook means the ability to send and receive messages with ~1 billion people at no cost. That's hugely valuable to a lot of people without the money for a general-purpose Internet connection.

And it will destroy the prospects of a healthy local internet economy where everyone can publish information or compete on a level playing field.

What constitutes the real internet - the rest of it ?

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