Facebook opens up Internet.org amidst net neutrality row | Hacker News Reader

Facebook opens up Internet.org amidst net neutrality row

bbc.com

60 pointsdenzil_correa55 comments

- HTTPS is a premium feature not included in Internet.org's package...

- Internet services/sites are whitelisted - essentially by Facebook.

- ISP tracking is baked into consumers' access. (Like Verizon's SuperCookies, which have just been rolled back for US consumers.)

- Select developers get to develop for the web ... but based off permission from higher ups. Because we all trust Facebook as a caretaker of a dev platform... we already know there will arbitrary rate-limiting for these devs.

The best part of Facebook's story was that Zuck didn't need permission to build it. How ironic...

Facebook has hijacked the word "Internet" for this initiative.

At best this is a whitewashed and severely limited offering that works against the push for real Internet access. And it sets all of the worst kinds of precedents for first-time users across the world.

As for the PR spin around this campaign, some words that come to mind: "disingenuous", "delusional".

http://www.medianama.com/2015/05/223-facebooks-internet-org-...

It's like a bizarro-world balkanized Internet - like the Online Gateways (Compuserve, AOL, etc) of past years.

Sounds like step back in time.

Ain't Facebook HTTPS by default? I guess the less privileged get no commitment to security from Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook/a-continued-commitme...

If they say its because India has more feature phones; someone must be screwing up with the numbers.

A free, ad-supported offering has limitations and appears to serve the advertiser, not the "user"? Cue internet outrage!

   If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product 
   being sold. -- blue_beetle on mefi

It never gets less remarkable that people don't understand that.

I don't think this is the case here. This is a freemium model, hoping the people CAN afford internet but do not know they NEED it will pay for the normal services with the operator.

It's the online services network that telcos have been trying to build since the late 1990s, but nobody wanted because it wasn't the Internet. What irritates me most is that the Wikimedia Foundation is whitewashing the whole effort, and complicating the public understanding of "net neutrality".

I mean, seriously, it would be obvious what a farce this is if it didn't come with Wikipedia access.

- No HTTPs - FB says it will track and use the data - FB approval process - FB owns/gets to reuse the content - Telco can shutdown service if app use increases

Are we doing enough to give the underprivileged access to Internet? This is not the internet, this is a f'ing monetisation channel!

> But Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg said it was "not sustainable to offer the whole internet for free".

I think that's exactly what they should do, if they're serious about this: just find a way to offer everyone the whole internet for free. If something must be compromised, then compromise speed, not access to sites. Sites that want to reach poor people would just have to practice draconian bandwidth discipline. At least that way, sites could opt in on their own terms, rather than having to kowtow to some consortium of rich people.

Everyone is complaining - why don't other people offer free internet? Just do it yourself

Should we not discuss our concerns for how people around the world connect to the same network? There are a number of people working on this problem, people who can handle the funding and work involved, but that still leaves room for us to comment on policy that will shape the way large populations interact with the rest of the world.

> But Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg said it was "not sustainable to offer the whole internet for free".

Quite plainly, that's false. 1Mb of an internet.org site costs operators exactly the same to carry as 1Mb of some other website.

Operators obviously have some average Mbs/user/month figure that they're willing to bundle as internet.org, expecting to recover this from the people who upgrade to a full internet plan. Whatever this number is, users can also be limited to this with a data cap, allowing them to There would then be no net neutrality concerns at all.

Facebook could continue to have the internet.org app, their proxy server, and they could be displayed as a default to the people on this plan. Those users would prefer them (they would really need to conserve data). It could even warn people about data consumption when they open the browser, as long as there is an option to click through. None of those things violate net neutrality, and they will keep 99% of users within the internet.org app.

Facebook has never said why they cannot do this, other than offering hand-wavy "poor people don't understand data caps because they don't know what megabytes are". This is false. Anyone who has a prepaid phone connection in, say, India understands how to navigate the bewildering complexity of phone plans (pay Rs. 30 to decrease the cost of calls by 50% between 10pm and 6am for 30 days). As long as there is some way for users to check how many MBs they have left, they will be fine.

I suspect that the real reason facebook opposes this is that they want to use their position as gatekeeper to shut out competition. If these "starter internet plans" operated as I described, Google will soon have its own "Google+ zero" built into Android.

Thanks to Android, Google enjoys unassailable market power as a gatekeeper on the device. The only way facebook can close that gap is by becoming the gatekeeper at the network level, which requires that net neutrality be subverted.

I love to demonize big tech as much as the next guy, but I really think the public consensus in India against Internet.org is inherently biased. The catalyst for the movement was a Youtube video. The chosen method of lodging protest was via email. AIB themselves would not be the thought leaders they are today if internet access was restricted to them. Every activist has been, by definition, in a position of privilege with respect to internet access. It seems we are cautiously ignoring the situation of the millions who have not had internet penetration till date and to whom the internet is broadly synonymous with "major" services like Facebook and Wikipedia. I am not in favor of Facebook forming their own internet cartel and I think anti-trust laws should work tirelessly to prevent that. But I think if you gave the average unconnected Indian a choice between no internet on ideological principles, and free internet, but restricted to Facebook and a few other services, they would choose connectivity any day of the week

Under Internet.org, none of us activists would have that voice anyway. It's a carefully curated walled garden, not the internet. It doesn't include YouTube, email, or any videos at all.

We are agitating to ensure everyone else gets the full internet, not just Facebook. It's not that hard. The government already collects 5% of all telco revenues for a "universal service obligation fund" and has not spent it. The money sitting in that account alone could give everyone internet access.

> But I think if you gave the average unconnected Indian a choice between no internet on ideological principles, and free internet, but restricted to Facebook and a few other services, they would choose connectivity any day of the week

Sure they would. Does that mean it is good for the ecosystem on the whole? No.

80% of internet.org users are users with existing data plans. How hard do you think it is to get someone switch over from free to paid? Even for a person of privilege, he will prefer a free meal over a paid meal unless there is a huge difference in quality of a free meal (e.g. bread) vs. paid plan (e.g. steak). Considering that only well capitalised companies can provide free meals, you have just made the uphill battle that startups everyday fight against BigCos into a vertical slope.

It doesn't have to be like this. The Delhi Government is going to soon roll out a free neutral Internet covering large parts of the city. There are many models of free Internet implemented all over the world.

We'll get connectivity to the millions, but it won't be on Facebook terms - it'll be on the terms as decided by a democratically elected nation.

Let me give you a quick recap of history. 250+ years back India was _NOT_ a great place. There was huge economic and educational divide. The rich kings kept getting richer and the poor just surviving. For them education wasn't even an after thought. Then came the Anglo-European travellers with their Bible to rid us of all our miseries. Slinging their religion they _did_ help remove some of the inequalities. Provided modern and great education. But the missionaries were soon followed by the imperialists. The missionaries had no clue what hit them. And what followed was 200 years of darkness and 1000s of steps backward. The Internet is the ultimate equaliser! It empowers people to rise up, just like education. India today is again _NOT_ a great nation. And Zuck and his crew are trying sling Internet the same way as the Bible was. While this might be a good thing at first sight, its _NOT_ and the effects of it will be realised 20-30 years later and by then my friend it would be too late. Just too late. Maybe Zuck and us won't be even around. Please take a moment [use system II in daniel kahneman words] and think through, we are privileged and the goal should be to bring everyone at the same level with the same world view.

On Zuckerberg's understanding of Net Neutrality and User Privacy, I'd like to quote Upton Sinclair, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Zuck has inadvertently admitted Internet-Org makes money by trading User Privacy. (Could the NSA be involved? Just asking) Wouldn't it be a good idea for a company like Facebook to make an entire generation of internet users believe that Privacy is not an option.

On April 17th, Zuck said they consult "Local Governments" to decide services (See his comment here during the QnA he had about Internet-Org: https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10102033678947881?commen...). Now he's saying Facebook and Telcos will decide which services to allow. Was he lying through his teeth during the QnA?

And please watch this Internet-Org ad broadcast in India - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s390lZ5UXc4. Kindly enlighten me about who are they marketing it to?

I really respect Facebook and Zuck for their technological, business and charitable achievements. But it lessens with every passing day as Zuck hides an anti-Net Neutrality, anti-competitive and anti-privacy practice by giving it a false PR spin.

I'm reminded of the old 'competitors' to the Internet that existed in the early 1990's. Remember Prodigy, or AoL?

Yes. And one important difference, you had to pay for those. (Some still are.)

I'll campaign for them if they put this in the tag line: "Free internet at the cost of your privacy". And change the domain from "internet.org" to "3rd-world-sucker-book.com" or something. I abhor the "social good" PR spin that Facebook is giving to this initiative. Otherwise, I'm all for providing connectivity to the billions. Just skip the charade. The whole initiative is a great pun on the word "free"

In the real world, this task should be best left to organizations that are truly working to keep the internet free & open (like mozilla).

> Facebook says it will allow more websites and other online services to join its "free mobile data" Internet.org scheme.

Great, so now other few big portals like Yahoo can also be accessed for "free". And Facebook will probably let you give their site for "free"... if you pay Facebook some $. Basically it always was clever business, is, and will be. Maybe it'd be a more palatable offering if Zuckerberg was more honest, if FB didn't masquerade internet.org as Zuck's blessing to humanity.

They are providing people who do not have internet with internet. They are giving people a useful service they did not have before for free. They aren't making people use the service or pay anything for it. I don't see a negative.

This is not the internet. This is facebook $\pm$ other big company's sites.

The problem is that this will not be until the real internet arrives for poor people but instead. For millions, maybe billions (potentially for the majority of the world's population) the internet could forever be only facebook/yahoo/${big corps website}...

They are not providing the Internet to people who do not have the Internet. They are providing a couple of websites in a walled garden.

They are not giving people a useful service that they did not have before, they are giving people a deliberately broken and compromised system.

They are not giving it to people for free, they are making people pay with their data and security.

As for not forcing people to use it, there's a pretty strong push to get people to use it and a commercial monopoly in a given market is often a disincentive to new entrants.

Those are some of the negatives.

    If you would just set me and my friends up as dictators,
    then we'd build a faux democracy and call it
    totalandcompletefreedom.org. Soon, everyone will benefit
    from the fake freedom and realize how amazing it is to
    be free.

https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2015/05/announcing-the-internet...

I am afraid that Mark and few others start to live up to their stereotype.

I am surprised how sneaky is their buisness and how far in the future they plan.

is bad internet really worse than no internet? Sounds like people are letting perfect getting in the way of good enough.

It isn't bad Internet. It is a proprietary network like AOL and CompuServe, and not the Internet at all. The name is intentionally misleading.

Allowing such proprietary networks to run over public radio spectrum causes harm to the real internet - and not just by slowing it down and making it more expensive.

The main long-term harm is the stifling effect on innovation, especially in businesses that rely on network effects: Even if you are a regular internet user, but some of your friends are on internet.org, you can only use communication, collaboration or social networking apps that are on internet.org. Even in other categories of apps, you might only hear about those that are on internet.org.

This means that we will move from an economy where end users decide which apps get popular, to one where facebook picks the winners.

This is scary.

If the real internet is inherently better than this aol 2.0, shouldn't simple market forces choose the internet as the winner?

Wireless spectrum is a scarce public resource, allocated by government license, effectively granting the telco a monopoly. Simple market forces don't apply here.

> Even if you are a regular internet user, but some of your friends are on internet.org, you can only use communication, collaboration or social networking apps that are on internet.org.

But before internet.org, you couldn't even communicate with them.

yeah, its kind of people stopping Bill Gates to help with Polio eradication since he is not helping with rest of the diseases. (Apparently nobody is doing that, thank god.)

Bad analogy, then? (Also, polio workers are getting shot in Pakistan.)

So to paraphrase...

Facebook: here's some free internet.

Angry people: Boo! Not enough free internet!!!

See also every free app in every App Store. It seems that this is just wired into human nature.

Your paraphrase is missing the other times white people showed up and built stuff "for them".

Good -- some Internet is better than no Internet, and if it takes a mountain of ads to get that to folks, so be it.

No this is not Internet. It is AOL v2. It could well mean that people never get any internet.

Semantics. internet.org gives folks the ability to connect on a global scale with others.

You would take that away from them, because it doesn't fit what you understand about how a set of computers should communicate?

The semantics are important. This could very well mean that those people won't get proper internet because "hey, what do you need that for, you've got internet.org!"

I understand the "some internet is better than none" but this isn't the internet. This is internet.org

On top of that, it means that Facebook gets to micromanage a populations internet usage, what they can and cannot see, with no legal oversight because "were doing you a favour!"

Totally. This is Facebook assuming control of what entire populations can see and hear, under the guise of charity. No effing bueno.

So you would literally go to these people and tell them they are going to continue to not have any way of communicating with one another or others throughout the world because what they're being offered isn't the "real" Internet?

You would tell them they must continue to live isolated from one another and the rest of the world? You'd deny them access to the single greatest invention humanity has ever come up with because it doesn't fit your ideology?

It doesn't have to be an All Or Nothing situation. Nobody has asserted that nobody should ever provide limited internet access to developing countries. It's just that Facebooks attempt have some very serious, and potentially malicious problems, which have been stated in this thread.

It is an all or nothing situation. You're asserting that you would take away internet.org. Since there is no alternative, that would leave the folks who must use internet.org with nothing.

I apologize for the account swapping -- HN decided I was commenting too much on my other account, and I wanted to continue our discussion while it was still fresh in both our minds.

There are alternatives. Look at Google Loon.

There are not alternatives. I recommend you look at Google Loon before citing it as an actively running alternative in India.

For the people who use Internet.org, there are literally no other ways to get online.

The problem with internet.org is it redefines "Internet" and "online" to mean "Facebook" and "Facebook". That is not the Internet, and the only thing truly "online" about it is the totally unencrypted and tracked browsing habits of the people. No number of token good-will sites or pay-to-play business sites will ever make this initiative the "Internet", and the wall of global segregation grows ever higher.

It's that, or literally nothing.

Not necessarily. If the internet.org initiative was truly noble, they could provide bandwidth-limited access to all of the Internet, along with an optional service or browser addon that formats pages for text-only viewing to save even more bandwidth.

Sure, but they don't, so it's either what they currently offer or nothing.

>It is an all or nothing situation

No, it's not. A service could exist that provides this functionality without the problems Facebook has created.

>You're asserting that you would take away internet.org

Please find where I said this.

But this isn't access to the single greatest invention humanity has ever come up with. It's a brand that takes its name and applies it to a surveillance monopoly.

It's internet.org that's denying people access to the Internet, not people pointing this fact out.

Internet.org is a set of interconnected computers. You want to get political and philosophical about what is and isn't the Internet, but Mumtaz in Bangalore wants to send $5 to his wife, and doesn't get to do that unless internet.org exists.

> a set of interconnected computers

That just makes it a network.

Mumtaz is a female name. And since that suggests you aren't very familiar with India, I'll recommend not assuming that Internet.org is the only way people are going to get Internet.

It's not even taken seriously in India and got dragged into this debate only because of other proposals that are actually, intentionally malicious.

I work with a Mumtaz, are you telling me he's a lady?

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