Nofakeinternet.org
nofakeinternet.org
nofakeinternet.org
Zuckerberg's partnership with telecom giants, Internet.org, provides access to a fake Internet where selected services are prioritized over others. This scheme threatens innovation, free expression, and privacy online.
It blocks many of the websites, apps, and services the world loves from being made available on equal terms.
The fake Internet will also restrict access to local service providers struggling to get a foothold online.
Loading a link, reading a few sentences, deciding if its useful to read more: it requires time.
A sort of standard short summarize to go with each link would make reading HN more efficient to me.
Also, I don't think very highly of Mark Zuckerberg's ethics, especially with regard to users privacy, but he's a very effective leader and there's no sense getting angry with his success.
It is up to governments to regulate markets, we can't expect CEOs to do anything but promote their own agenda. If you want to get mad at someone, take it out on government regulators who are corrupt or otherwise fail to promote competition.
Then why are we still using SMTP for the majority of online communications? Once something gets entrenched, it's difficult to change at scale.
I can see how we first-worlders really like net neutrality and everything. I do see that we fear that our web access might get more expensive if access prioritisation is successful somewere else, but: Since we all already do have access to the internet it just appears to me to be endlessly selfish from us to make them wait 10 years to get the full internet for themselves.
My major gripe with internet.org is that its not really "for the poor". The minimum requirement for internet.org is an Android smartphone, which costs atleast 6000 INR (100 USD).
If someone has the purchasing power for an Android smarthphone (over say, a dumbphone that would cost 1/6th of that), you definitely have enough to pay for data charges (which are in the range of a 2-3 USD per month at most). I used to browse internet on Opera Mini on a "pay-as-you-go" plan (something like 0.1 INR/40kb I think) and I paid less than 1 USD/month for that.
My usage was certainly minimal (HN + GMail + Google News + Facebook) with images turned off. But now that I have the purchasing ability to buy a smartphone, I do have enough to pay for a costlier data plan as well (3-4 USD/month).
Paying <5% of your phone cost a month for data charges is not that hard.