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Comment by manish_gill | Hacker News Reader

After limited protest/outrage in communities like /r/india, the news finally hit big when a comedy group AIB decided to make a video explaining what Net Neutrality is: https://youtu.be/mfY1NKrzqi0 and then it finally hit mainstream media. Amid pressure from everywhere, Flipkart finally withdrew from the Airtel Zero deal which would have been a blow to Net Neutrality in India.

Of course, next step was Internet.org and similar initiatives, which on paper sound like a fantastic idea until you look deeper and begin to see the NN violation problem. This is welcome news indeed. Btw, this was Zuckerburg's response when posed this question: https://i.imgur.com/PAwf6e3.png "Some connectivity is better than no connectivity, hence the violation of NN is justified"

Last few days have been a mixture of anxiousness and excitement. :)

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"Btw, this was Zuckerburg's response when posed this question: https://i.imgur.com/PAwf6e3.png"

Bullshit. Facebook cannot become AOL (which is what all the platforms desperately want to become) unless they can vertically integrate with the network.

They cannot currently do that in the US and most of the global north because of antitrust and the growing support and knowledge of net neutrality (thanks, Tim[1]).

But maybe they can get away with it in the global south ... plenty of market share there ...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Wu#The_Master_Switch

This is their plan exactly. However, we have been able to get 6 out of 39 brands to pull their support back. Hopefully, tomorrow we will see even better support!

Lots of factors at play here. Till a few months ago, India didn't even have a competition commission. We have no anti-trust laws.

You also have to understand the history of telecom in India, especially the Value-Added-Services on mobile. They killed startups ( http://rashmiranjanpadhy.com/2015/04/12/airtel-kills-startup... ), they activated services without users' consent and so on. Can you imagine how big this fraud was in India where 40% of the people are not even literate? It was plain and simple fraud.

Everyone and his uncle learned to curse the telcos in that era. Now they're coming for the web, disparagingly calling it "Over-The-Top services".

India has a Competition Commission since 2002.

http://www.cci.gov.in/index.php?option=com_content&task=view...

Thanks. I must have confused it with some amendment regarding competition commission.

Denzil - we have bodies and committees for every thing but no action takes place. Our CCI is a joke. There is no anti-trust. And less said about our courts & justice system the better.

Just a small eg: Satyam chief, Ramalingam Raju, picked up the phone and gave himself in to SEBI (US version of SEC) confessing to financial fraud of INR 4000 crores+ massive job losses, massive losses/harakiri in pension/taxes owed to the govt (due to inflated employee #) to the extent of he had one of the big4 auditors in his pocket who signed over falsified bank balance statements. This resulted in govt having to take over the co and auctioning it out to TechMahindra. At the time Satyam was the #3 Software services company in India by sheer revenue and employee size. Raju gave detailed proofs of each of his wrongdoings ("when he could not ride this tiger anymore") and yet it took our courts 7 years + to impose a rap-on-knuckles 7 years of imprisonment and 5 crores of fines. An amount which he could've made bamboozled off in one day of stock manipulation on the exchanges.

So my point is it's one thing to have all these fancy bodies and titles and quite another to have them act on anything.

This recent action against zero-rated apps by one of our telcos, Airtel, is a heartening move which ofcourse morphed into heat brought upon FB's internet.org which is a bigger culprit on net neutrality front.

Way to go online activism in India! (Disclosure: I'm a member of the #SaveTheInternet volunteer group)

I do understand that most of these bodies are toothless but we do have a CCI. The parent comment mentioned that we don't have one and I thought I would mention the fact that we do. As we speak, the CCI seems to be probing Indian telecoms.

http://telecom.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/industry/cc...

I'm not in favor of zero rating or violations of net neutrality as we know it.

Disclosure : I'm a passive member of the #SaveTheInternet volunteer group (anonymously) too. I really appreciate your efforts and work. I am trying to tell all my colleagues and friends about you guys. Keep going!

oh well ...hello! :-) and sorry I kinda took a shortcut to the assumption that you were not an Indian.

These commissions are set up here, only after someone from a global body like UN, World Bank, IMF etc complains about their absence.

Quick note on numbers:

"Crore" means 10 million (it's a modifier like "hundred" or "thousand" and does not necessarily relate to money).

10 000 000 Indian rupees = 160 310 U.S. dollars

I just bought the book. Sounds like a very nice read. Thanks.

> Facebook cannot become AOL (which is what all the platforms desperately want to become) unless they can vertically integrate with the network.

Maybe you could also interpret the backlash against Zero/AOL as an indication that customers do not want corporations regulating their access to information. So perhaps network carriers should think twice about aiming for a captive audience with "vertical integration".

> Btw, this was Zuckerburg's response when posed this question: https://i.imgur.com/PAwf6e3.png "Some connectivity is better than no connectivity, hence the violation of NN is justified"

That is not a literal quote. Here is the actual quote from that image -

"For people who are not on the internet though, having some connectivity and some ability to share is always much better than no ability to connect and share at all. That's why programs like Internet.org are important and can co-exist with net neutrality regulations."

My bad, I paraphrased the implications of the comment.

Presenting it as a direct quote is intellectually dishonest. Please don't use that kind of manipulation here, even if you think your cause warrants it.

In case you didn't notice, I also pasted the exact statement he gave as a screenshot. I only see an honest mistake (which was really just having the quotes around the thing -- I can't edit it otherwise I would have) instead of intellectual dishonesty. But thanks for the lesson.

I was a little hasty jumping on your previous post. Thanks for the clarification.

Another great Zuckerburg quote for the internet history books..

That video is wonderful. Anyone know of a video that outlines the importance of net neutrality as it pertains to America? This video covers the core idea excellently, but some of the details are very specific to India and their struggle with neutrality. I'd love to have something to show people that think Neutrality is some government overstep. But I feel like they'd be too distracted by the fact that it's not specifically discussing the new American laws (which is stupid, I know).

Did you not see the John Oliver segment? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpbOEoRrHyU

Nope, don't watch TV and never saw it popup on my subreddits or facebook wall. Thanks!

A website that explains the importance of Net Neutrality, in general.

http://www.theopeninter.net

> https://i.imgur.com/PAwf6e3.png "Some connectivity is better than no connectivity, hence the violation of NN is justified"

Does he really not see the enormous liability that a precedent like this can create?

There is a bigger picture you're not aware of that is in play here.

Zuckerberg is providing free internet to millions.

There are ways to provide free internet to millions, while NOT compromising on neutrality or providing convenient network leverage to Facebook and Reliance to pick winners.

How is X megabytes / month for free but with ads (this is network neutral) not better than Internet.org's current model? Why not let those millions decide which are the essential internet services for them? Do the poor millions don't deserve choice?

Let the user chose for himself. How hard can this be?

This is not about choice. (.. or we would appreciate the option to browse facebook for free.)

It's about net neutrality. Unconnected people in India shouldn't destroy the bad impression we associated with this policy in the first place.

> with ads

Why ads? Facebook would be providing internet.org for free, right? If the goal is getting more people on the internet, then internet.org could provide unfettered access to the internet and still reach their goal. However, if the aim is to get more people on their platform and increase Facebook's bottom line, then the goal is about manipulating one of the most disenfranchised people.

A way out for the zero rated schemes and internet.org is to sponsor bandwidth for the end user. The telecom service providers could offer 100mb per month free to the end users and bill internet.org et al for the service.

If you provide free capped connections to the end-users (with selected services not counting toward the cap), that would be a totally different discussion indeed.

But that's not the case here.

Except providing free access to Facebook is not "free internet." It is just free Facebook (and whatever related services). It is not truly "the internet" if it is restricted to Facebook (and associated services).

Better no internet than facebook? Sounds cynic.

Better just internet.

It's like McDonald's building "free" roads that you can use to reach McDonald's, but if you want to go anywhere else you have to pay tolls. It is unbelievably self-serving and for Zuckerburg to dissemble on that point is wildly disingenuous.

"Well, at least they can reach McDonald's" is not a good argument against just building roads and letting people drive wherever.

I like this analogy with roads because land like wireless spectrum is a very finite resource especially at the last mile.

Personally, I wish there was a better scheme to allocate precious wireless spectrum other than giving a 100 year license to the highest bidder in an auction. (Whether the auction is rigged or not is besides the point.)

We talk about common carrier when it comes to wireline communication but why can't we do the same for wireless?

I don't know about others but it sickens me to think that we consider it an achievement to raise a couple of billion dollars for granting exclusive license to prime low frequency spectrum to Cingular/Verizon. Wouldn't it be better if wireless carriers didn't have to fight over who has the least bad coverage? There has to be a better way...

To me it sounds like McDonalds sending out a free shuttle bus to pick you up, but the shuttle only takes you to McDonalds (and not Wendy's or whatever). This actually exists with things like free hotel airport shuttles.

But you're assured you've just seen the entire city and you're done and can go back now.

well, there is also an alternative road where you always pay toll, no matter where you wanna go, so most people from the village have never gone out.

Also, to be in good books McDonalds is giving access to school and hospital also for free.

No, what he's doing is providing free Facebook so that his user base increases, so he has more people's privacy to exploit, mine for data, and then sell to the highest bidder.

The precedent already exists, at least here in Australia. Luckily it hasn't caused too many problems thus far, but whether that is merely an outlier remains to be seen.

To clarify for the global audience: (most) broadband in Australia is metered, so back when ADSL started getting big, ISP's would offset 14GB bandwidth cap with 'free zone' content - data which is unmetered. This still continues today, the most recent competitive offering is unmetered Netflix - http://www.optus.com.au/netflix

Which, the latest news is that Netflix regrets signing these deals in the first place http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2015/04/netflix-regrets-signing-un...

Wow, there are actual countries with bandwidth cap and privileged content for Home Internet? Damn, I thought that was just the hypothetical scarecrow of NN defenders =/

eh. It's something that made sense over ten years ago. Very little content was hosted locally within Australia so most traffic had to go over the expensive links to other countries (which are obviously constrained in bandwidth). Privileged/unmetered content was often things like local Steam mirrors or whatnot which was closer to the user/ISP.

Now that more and more content is cached locally, there's less and less of a need for it both bandwidth caps and privileged content.

But then why didn't they give you a shitty bandwidth when you try to access such remote content? That would be fair game, instead of capping the global data transferred over a month..

Aren't video games really expensive there for no reason?

Video Games, Songs on iTunes, Internet, Phone Services... The list goes on, pretty much everything is expensive over here, even digital products with zero shipping or handling costs are triple or more the price in the US. For example I pay $70/month for 200GB of 'broadband' that peaks at 500kb/s and is totally incapable of streaming video. My mobile phone costs $95/month and I get 5GB of data.

actually the problem comes from the profit seeking companies. The original intention was provide help to the poor people who can't afford it. I remember wikipedia and some other non profit companies were initially interested in providing this for free. As far as I know aircel still provides it for free. It not just in India though many countries like Russia Indonesia also offer something. The situation changes when you have profit seeking companies trying utilise the situation. Cleartrip response exposes this perfectly.

Popular support for net neutrality rallied at the last minute by comedians, eh? Comments sent en masse to a regulatory body? Sounds familiar! Hopefully the result will be the same.

With any luck we'll also turn out to be a campaign to be remembered. :)

In some ways I agree with Zuckerburg here, except that I don't think Facebook (or any other privately held company) should be the one to do it. An initiative to bring the Internet to people who cannot afford it or are so remote they are out-of-touch with modern economies should be done by the public sector and/or charities.

Besides, I fail to see how this sort of thing would even be technically feasible. If you can provide some connection to the Internet, you can provide connections to all of the Internet, yes?

I was against this zero movement from the start. I'm really happy to see that it is started to be seen as anti-NN. Wishing for Turkey Operators to pull out too.

All said and done, there's still no point in all this report unless TRAI/Government pull their socks up and make net neutrality a reality by law.

Wow, the mask really came off on that one.

What is the source of that Constine/Zuckerberg exchange?

The latest Q&A session he did on his page. https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10102028100357421

what is the source of that Constine/Zuckerberg exchange?

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