Internet.org will finish internet the way we know it, hurt India’s growth | Hacker News Reader

Internet.org will finish internet the way we know it, hurt India’s growth

sunday-guardian.com

99 pointsakbarnama79 comments

This will not end well for Facebook. Once you start competing like this, you quit competing with innovation and eventually end up losing to someone else.

FB (& Google) have reached a size where one of the ways to keep growing is to bring more people onto the Internet. If they can do that in a way that puts their product front-and-centre for those 'new' users, they can capture more of the market. I'm not saying I approve of this strategy, but I can see it as being a viable one for now (just as AOL was viable for its time).

Death of the net predicted!

But the Internet defeated walled gardens before, because people actively chose "the whole shebang" over AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, etcetera.

And, continuing improvements in networking keep making it easier, at the margin, to just offer everything.

Any fixed-menu-of-N-services, even if regularly updated, will be blatantly missing some emerging content or app that friends are talking about. That will drive people to upgrade to (or creatively tunnel!) to the real, full Internet as soon as they're technically or financially able. And that ability arrives fast, given whetted appetites, social pressures, and the rapid progress in networking tech.

Don't panic. Build. Any net barrier that's just a matter of puny business models will be temporary, and melt away from competition & Moore's Law.

Watch out, instead, for the net barriers enforced by ideologues with badges & guns. Those blockades can hold out against technological and economic forces much longer.

I'm Indian and I'm deeply frustrated and disappointed with this. My fear is that other mobile networks like Airtel will pick up dumb ass half-baked ideas like this and start charging for data from other non approved sources and for high cost paid wireless Internet to become the norm. I know Reliance is way too greedy, but this really is a new low. While wireless data costs in other countries are coming down, here we see the opposite trend. Fucking disgusting.

As a fellow Indian, I'd find that frustrating too.

Think of the alternative - suppose the government or judiciary finds this practice illegal and outlaws it. Imagine how unlikely this is and even if it does happen, how much bad press would be generated about "job-killing License Raj" etc.

Regardless of the press, a level playing field would in fact be a boon for upcoming businesses. Bad press is inevitable - look at the recent uproar in the US over net neutrality. There are still some people who want to make it look like the FCC is somehow restricting private enterprise which is A Bad Thing.

>>how much bad press would be generated about "job-killing License Raj" etc.

I'm amazed many Indians still fall for this. The current day telecommunications companies came into being like knights in shining armor, to fight the decades of rot and stagnation in the ecosystem due to BSNL in the early 2000's.

Now their whole business is being disrupted in the same way, they disrupted BSNL's business. Price innovation, innovation in customer service and making services accessible to every one at affordable prices. Now when they are being given a dose of their own medicine, they want the government to come in and have regulations to save them.

Funny how capitalism works when you are at the receiving end.

If these people aren't stopped now they will let things stagnate and rot for the next half century. We all know how well that worked out.

"start charging for data"? Wait, does that mean they do not charge for data at this moment in time?

Are ISP government supported and thus free of charge to any citizen?

No they are charging for data. I think belorn wanted to say something like airtel will charge pay per site violating net neutrality.

I think that belorn is trying to imply 'airtel's charging of VOIP calls' here

Probably start a petition/campaign and collaborate with Centre for Internet and Society in India http://cis-india.org/internet-governance for raising the issue

Also relevant:

internet.org (within India) redirects to 0.internet.org, which takes me to 0.internet.org/unavailable with the following message:

>You must be on the Reliance network to use Internet.org. If you'd like to access these websites for free, use a SIM card from Reliance.

This is really getting out of hand.

Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/2x1vWZr.png

It's available from outside India, but not on a paid connection from within? Ridiculous, indeed...

I don't know what internet.org is for. But it's such a braindead move for them. I won't (and I bet a lot many Indians) switch to the shittiest network in India just for some website. I will find alternatives to the website.

Maybe I misunderstood. But I think the alarm bells are pre-mature. You HAVE to pay for internet access, what this announcements says is that if you visit some websites you will not be charged. How is it any bad? The websites are paying the telecom company to bear the cost of the traffic. The customer, like always, is bearing the cost of traffic to internet.

If you are a startup trying to compete with any of those 38 sites, thrn you start with a massive disadvantage. Zuckerberg is essentialy creating a massive walled garden where the walls are held in place by economic pressure.

but are people better off or worse? Should fb be forced to subsidize access to competitors?

Does India have an effective internet access monopoly (occasionally a duopoly) ala the us, which is why I supported fcc regulations?

This. I favor net neutrality, but I think much of the "moral outrage" comes from a combination of paternalism, self-serving attitudes and petty, pampered middle class arrogance and not a discerning realism. Vacuous and self-righteous sloganeering do not impress me. Luxuries are not a given.

The question that should be asked (which you bring up) from the position of those who receive the service: does it help or hurt them in the here-and-now? Are they better or worse off, on the whole, than they would have been without the service? I also presume this service is being offered in a relatively free market.

It's not like people will stop getting an internet connection. They will still have it. They will open other websites as well. The traffic from a particular website is not significant anyway so I don't think they will go to/prefer websites with free access only. Facebook right now has no competition, they would have used it anyway and it something better comes along people won't care about the few MBs/month it costs them.

ISPs have already been giving free WhatsApp plans and all, nothing changed for telegram et al I suppose.

Just google "Net Nutrality" and see what's so wrong about this initiative. People smarter than me have talked about the matter, so better read what they have to say, but I'll just say that the reason the Internet is so successful in bringing all sorts of ideas to fruition is that it doesn't discriminate ideas, and lets all information flow equally. If there are companies whose ideas are worth more than others, or are cheaper to reach - you no longer have a free(as in free speach) internet.

I know(I think) about "Net Neutrality". There is a difference between discriminating between packets and charging more for particular traffic and providing access to some sites for free. They are not charging more for a particular kind of traffic and so I assume they are Net Neutral.

Did I miss something?

They are charging more for particular types of traffic! Anything other than a select few sites is being charged.

No, you are bending it. They are charging the same they were before and there is no change in that regard. They are still charging same regardless of what the packet contains. Some sites are paying to be subsidised. They are paying for a service, what's wrong? You want to compete? Get your site subsidise as well. Someone has to pay either the customer or the provider, customer doesn't have to pay more for particular traffic. Do you expect ISPs to provide all data for free?

> They are still charging same regardless of what the packet contains.

The issue here is that this is not internet. Facebook has partnered with a local ISP that decided that some packets (say, those from Wikipedia) can pass for free but others (say, those from GMail) cannot. Wikipedia is not (AFAIK) an AS; as such it doesn't have a deal with Reliance Communications at the internet level. And yet, there is now some business for Reliance to transport Wikipedia's packets. This is completely breaking the internet as it is designed (and as it works best)

All the chatter we've seen with ISPs and content providers is because AS interco is highly contentious. In this case we're not talking (only) about AS; we're talking about websites having to bend to an ISP for it to behave as expected. It's absolutely not ok.

> customer doesn't have to pay more for particular traffic

Of course he doesn't have to, because he doesn't even have access to it, whether there is a route from website to ISP or not. That's the horrible part of it: now peering with an AS is not enough, you need some other arrangement.

> Do you expect ISPs to provide all data for free?

I expect users to pay for laying cables, then everyone peers with everyone else and traffic is free. But we're not there yet.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_system_%28Internet%...

While looking at this from the point of view of AS is helpful to understand the ISP industry, it does not help to understand why giving away things for free is bad.

Lets look at the first thing that springs to mind about giving stuff away for fee: humanitarian aid. If a larger food producer "dump" free food into a region, this will decrease the incentives for local grown food, while driving up prices of alternative source of nutrition. A "evil" organization could, I guess, use humanitarian aid as a method to destroy local industry and cement themselves as the only game in town. The question then becomes, is the concept of humanitarian aid wrong and could there be safeguards that will prevent misuse.

I would suggest that non-profit charity that gives out food, medicin and knowledge is an acceptable line in the sand, while commercial monopolies and for-profit price dumping is bad. This still enables the good aspects of "free", while preventing bad actors from exploiting the side effects of giving away things for free. In the context of Internet this would mean that Wikipedia and similar non-profit information sharing sites would be acceptable, but not for-profit companies like facebook and google.

I think you are saying that access to some sites is blocked? That is not the case (for most). I see that internet.org is now accessible only from Reliance network. But it won't end nicely for internet.org.

I am yet to see a website being blocked because the site didn't pay for the "privilege" to be accessible. I am just seeing some sites becoming exclusive (to their own detriment) and some sites being provided for free. I don't see a problem here.

The ones trying to be exclusive will fall hard face first. The ones not being provided for free will not be affected. People will continue to pay for internet access, they are not going to limit themselves to 32 websites. It might be helpful for those unprivileged Indians who can not afford an internet connection though.

I would love to see the peering style take off too :)

The new Net Neutral laws had an intentional loophole. An ISP can provide cheaper access to sites out of only good will. aka not in a business partnership or affiliation.

I do not know if facebook is paying for this service though.

I find it funny that people only seem to start caring when there is a "bad" name on it (I didn't hear much else than praise for Wikipedia Zero, for example).

And the primary complaint seems to be that they might do something bad maybe, but they haven't yet (specifically, they might start charging more (why? because they are bad of course) for standard commections)

for >90% of things, the "short" and long tail of businesses are going to both cost money to access their sites, the economy isn't going to erupt in flames

IMHO, the "connectivity for everyone" thing is a thin cover of "controlled distribution channels for anyone who can't afford better".

> people won't care about the few MBs/month it costs them.

This initiative is targeted at the very broad population who can barely afford an Internet connection and computers of any kind. The cost of a few MB/month is something they do worry about. Besides:

> The traffic from a particular website is not significant anyway so I don't think they will go to/prefer websites with free access only.

The traffic from accessing a particular website once, in a "typical" browsing session, seems insignificant to you. I don't think the traffic from today's ad-ridden news websites is so insignificant for someone who doesn't surf the web all day.

In typical Facebook fashion, they describe this as something meant to "bring connectivity for everyone", when what it really aims to "bring a certain kind of connectivity, to a few certain websites, for everyone".

If you have a look at the list of websites included there, this is more than "but they'll only use Facebook for social networking, which they're already doing". They'll also only use BBC, Reuters and Times of India to read news and political opinions, TimesJobs and Babajob to look for jobs and so on. I.e. there will be only a few select information sources and sources of employment in this "connectivity for everyone" thing. This has considerable consequences, e.g. no (cheap!) way to check sources on science-related news or blacklisting "unwanted" companies from the only two widely-available job-seeking websites.

This article is phrased very awkwardly.

It reads like giving away free access to certain sites, is the same as making premium internet access. Am I missing something? Facebook hate aside, this is a change meant to give something away. Right?

Ask Netscape how they feel about Microsoft giving Internet Explorer away.

Ask Microsoft how they feel about Linus giving Linux away.

Giving away IE for free hasn't worked that well for Microsoft anyway. Open Source communities giving away *BSD's and Linux for free has been disastrous for Microsoft, on the longer run.

Android and iOS have eaten Microsoft's lunch big time.

Netscape wa giving its browser away for free too. I remember I was downloading it from netscape.com without paying. What made Microsoft subject to an antitrust investigation was bundling IE with Windows. MS lost the case but too late for Netscape.

To answer another reply to your post, that's also the difference with Linus distributing Linux for free. No bundling. Furthermore there is the open source vs closed source issue which is no small difference too.

They made it free in response to Microsoft and refocused on monetizing servers.

I really never paid for it. According to http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Navigator it was free for non commercial users. There were a few changes along the months but eventually "the full version of the browser continued to be made available for free online".

Funneling people to a restricted number of websites by making them easier to access (and money matters for a large number of Indians, spending ~2.5 USD a month for 500MB 3G internet is considered a luxury) and then profiting off advertising on those websites definitely feels like it skews the balance in favour of these who run said 'approved' websites.

Yes, it gives away free access of 38 sites. But by doing so, they also encourage more people to forgo purchasing complete internet plans and hence accessing all of the other millions of websites out there. This indirectly drives traffic to this 38 sites that they’ve picked through a very skewed and opaque process, and undermines the concept of net neutrality.

There is no such thing as a free lunch. This is simply an example of this in effect.

If people want full internet access.. pay for it. There is no story here.

I think the worry is about the other direction. Want to offer something to people who only pay for this limited access? Then you better don't do anything these sites don't like, because you have to use them to communicate with your customers (unless you are already big and powerful enough to negotiate such deals yourself)

But people won't know there is "full" Internet access, or will be unable to justify the cost versus making do with the "free 38".

At present in the UK my monthly broadband connection costs just over one day of minimum-wage salary. Or nearly a week of groceries. I can see how easily that could be seen as a worthwhile saving for people on low incomes.

Is your theory that, people who can already afford to buy such access, will now not want to buy access to the rest of the Web / Internet - despite the value proposition offered by that?

What's wrong with this? They're not preventing you from paying for Internet access, they're offering some access for free. People in India are free to start competing ISPs.

ISP's have to buy license from government.

But a HN post showed a way to tunnel normal traffic through FB chat[].

:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9203946

Neither Facebook or Reliance Communications Ltd prevent anyone from obtaining those licenses.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_%28pricing_policy%29 for one example of how giving something away for free can be net worse for the economy/world than charging a fair price for it.

Another issue is what is given for free. If free access is given to something that is 80% of what they need, people will have reduced incentive to buy 100%, shrinking the market for the 100% solution, raising its price, and keeping it out of reach of most people. As an analogy, giving people free low quality food could discourage them from high quality food, and the lack of market for good food could drive up its price further.

If you're swayed by that logic, should perhaps Google be forced to charge users for web search, and Android, and their other "free" offerings that put smaller competitors at a disadvantage?

The difference here is that of "service" and "utility". Google can offer its services for free. However, it should not be allowed to partner with a utility to make its services free, if that makes sense.

You won't get a response to that, for the same reason you won't get a response to: should all Linux vendors be forced to charge prices comparable to Windows, because otherwise they're dumping?

And of course OpenOffice should be made illegal under that same logic.

They also give you the source code. That makes the whole issue so different that I won't use Linux and OO as an analogy for this Indian case.

Google being add supported doesn't directly raise the cost of competing services. Conversely Facebook making a deal to make accessing itse service free on a paid network has the direct consequence of making the cost of using competing services go up. The cost of free access to Facebook has to be borne by somebody, if not the ISP then the customer has to pay it when they acess non-subsidised sites.

Internet.org is not about giving things away for free, it's about a cartel using their combined market power to negotiate subsidies and fix prices in order to distort the market.

"net worse" by what measure? How is a "fair" price determined, and by whom?

Basic telecommunications infrastructure in India is heavily regulated by a government that once actually proposed banning all VoIP services apart from the ones they offer at premium prices. Thanks to a high degree of corruption and bureaucracy, it is near impossible to enter the ISP game unless you have serious monetary or political clout. Simply starting a competing ISP is not really feasible.

Sure it is, Beam telecom (ACT now), You broadband, Spectranet (citycom now, although it is older).

If you are implying that serious investment is required to setup the infrastructure, you are correct. This is the nature of the telecom game.

Fair enough. I suppose it is more accurate to claim that entering a business with high infrastructural costs is not possible for most people (where will the money come from?) and my guess is that only a small number of people who are in a position to start such a business would actually know and care about net neutrality.

Reliance Communications Ltd must pay those entry costs as well. I don't see why that's relevant to my point at all.

Reliance Communications Ltd is an arm of one of the largest companies in India, and one of a very very small number of players who can actually not only afford the entry cost, but actually outspend the competition. I understand that they aren't actively preventing people from competing with them, but it's not much of a stretch to imagine the other big players in Indian telecom following suit, resulting not in fast and slow lanes, but toll free and toll collected lanes. I don't think anyone's saying that Reliance is impinging on the freedom of others to compete with them as an ISP, they're objecting to life being more difficult for internet-based businesses that want to get off the ground without paying a fee to ISPs to get them on the toll free lanes.

You're couching your defence of this in free market terms, but the truth is that for customers of this ISP these web sites no longer exist in a free market for Internet services. They have managed to skew the market in their favour by artificially lowering the overall cost of using their services and artificially raising the cost of connecting to competing services. You can't have your free market cake on one end of the argument and eat it on the other. Either you're in favour of free markets at both ends, or you aren't.

Yes there is a market for ISP access and consumers are free to chose another. That's fair. Nobody is arguing this is illegal, it not even necessarily immoral for the people that made the deal. It's just business and companies give away freebies all the time for all sorts of reasons. The problem comes if this becomes standard practice, because at that point you don't have an open market anymore, you have an industry cartel that has stitched up the market to divide it up between themselves. See Adam Smith for why this is bad and why, in order to operate equitably and in the public interest, markets need to be regulated in order to remain free.

> no longer exist in a free market for Internet services

How so? Anybody is free to start an ISP that doesn't do this. The existence of this ISP does not prevent anyone from starting their own. There is absolutely a free market in ISPs, and the only thing that would prevent a competing ISP is the government (by denying a license) - not Reliance Communications Ltd

> They have managed to skew the market in their favour by artificially lowering the overall cost of using their services and artificially raising the cost of connecting to competing services.

There's nothing artificial about it. McDonald's selling a burger for $1 doesn't prevent anyone from selling burgers at that price or a lower price. If McDonald's gives burgers away for free, that does not prevent anyone else from doing the same.

> You can't have your free market cake on one end of the argument and eat it on the other.

I'm not sure what you mean by free market as you use the term. The fact that its hard to compete against McDonalds (or Reliance Communications) doesn't mean others aren't free to compete.

> you have an industry cartel that has stitched up the market to divide it up between themselves.

Yet other investors and entrepreneurs are free to eat their lunch... unless gasp consumers actually like what they're being offered more than the alternatives you're personally interested in.

Seems like we need a return of the BBS ethos, where anyone can put up some bandwidth and invite folks to join in the party for free.

Perhaps internet.org is only going to create a new market for Internet provision that will be 'easy' to enter. Let them get their chained masses, then roll out a normal ISP with wide open doors.

(Of course, this would depend on the ability to actually get Internet in the area .. and assumes they don't have peer licensing all wrapped up somehow.)

And then there is this age-old fact, which hasn't really gone away in spite of Zucks' efforts: The Internet perceives toll-booths as damage, and routes around them. Here's hoping there will be "peers on the ground" who will fight this battle from there, too.

this will create a rat race, there will be big companies like flipkart paytm willing to offer money to Reliance to offer there sites for free. Internet.org is on a path to destroy net neutrality. Reliance has just found 1 way to earn more money without any ethics.

Yeah, flipkart came to my mind instantly as well. If internet.org really wants to help improve the state of internet, just subsidize internet as a utility.

Doesn't the culture of free web services actually create some of the perverse incentives at play in Google, Facebook and others today? The paying customers become advertisers and data miners and users are relegated to giving up their information (and potentially: future freedom). If people paid for these services, internet companies would see them as customers to serve rather than personal data to sell and exploit.

And that is why we need dumb pipes.

I must say this is very interesting pont of view - eye opener.

When we will get a company that will actually shove all those nasty corpo style companies under the rug and actually improve web?

My interpretation is that the data count for the proposed sites would not be included in the internet plan that a consumer might have taken. It might have some impact on internet pack pricing, but competition should be able to correct it. I don't see any hit on the net neutrality; as of now, it simply appears like a freemium model.

It's understandable that Facebook needs partners to execute their vision of connecting people. I'm rooting that they end up succeeding, but if its through restricting people with low incomes to services which the connected masses don't normally use (Bing) it sux.

I think this is good. Actually if I don't remember wrong this kind of 0 plan is already available if Finland for Facebook on at least one operator. As far as I can see there are no downsides. Access to listed sites can save lives.

i think the alarm bells are a little unfounded. The internet.org initiative is to connect people who are not in the internet grid. Take a moment and think about who those people are. Do they use Saas, would they care to read a critically analyzed piece written by a journalist? The ones taking Saas subscriptions, writing/reading blogs are already connected and in the internet ambit. I cant clearly see the relation between Reliance Jio and India's growth. And moreover, the idea of giving free internet will not be sustaiable. Hope it makes sense.

i think its great for people who don't have access to the internet especially poorer sections but they should've included better sites for learning expanding their knowlege etc.

This is the same as the net neutrality issue. Some of the animals are more equal than the others.

An information oligarchy may be the single source of truth.

People using this service will not consider it (or even call it) "internet", so it will not hurt the internet.

HOF (HTTP over Facebook) when?

Thinking about it a bit more, if Facebook messages are themselves free, you can set up a fake facebook account and run a desktop client which acts on special messages, in effect achieving TCP over XMPP. This is probably no more than a week of work for one motivated developer.

Or, given that wikipedia is free, you could use a private talk page to transmit data too. That could be even faster for individual files. Post a message to the talk page which a daemon polls frequently, then replaces the talk page with a base-64 encoding of the content you requested.

Both of those require you to have a machine with unrestricted internet access, but I imagine unrestricted home internet access to be much cheaper than mobile internet.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9203946

Unsurprisingly, the need was raised from the same "internet.org" bullshit.

This is such a horrible idea, I don't even know where to start. I'm not even worried about the long term consequences of this service, it is going to fail gloriously. How do I know this? Because it has has happened so many times before. Anybody remember long distance? That is what this is - and it might be the funniest thing I've seen all week. Thanks for the laugh Zuckerberg.

I don't get it, it is free, and worried about being charged to access it beyond the free version?

More "worried about what happens to those sites that can't be accessed for free". If a large number of your potential customers can only access a few sites or have financial incentive to only access them, you are now forced to conduct business through them (and good luck launching a competitor).

Expected nothing less from our Zuckerberg. NSA at least makes the pretense of seeming hands off when fucking over people, Zuck just doesn't give a shit.

Anyway - what can we actually do to stop this? Anything? Clearly this is the beginning of something unthinkably bad, and we should do absolutely anything to stop this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com