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Comment by icelancer | Hacker News Reader

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.

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