Internet.org Is Not Neutral, Not Secure, and Not the Internet
eff.org
eff.org
So yeah, we don't need first world people to speak for us saying how it's helping the poor and stuff.
If they are so interested in connecting the poor, then they can just allocate a certain amount of data for consumption rather than act as gatekeepers.
Also, Facebook is a corporation aiming to increase their shareholders money. Why would anybody trust them with Internet.org? Wikipedia is non-profit, so it's fine with me if it's offered for free.
[1] : http://gadgets.ndtv.com/internet/news/trai-receives-over-1-m...
This reminds me of all the ridiculous cheap laptops for the Third World projects - all of which completely failed. Meanwhile the factories in China keep churning out ever-cheaper laptops and phones which are having a real impact without any of the grandiose talk about Helping The Poor.
Cheaper laptops work. Laptops with hand-cranks because The Poor Don't Have Electricity don't. Internet.org is at best the Internet with a hand-crank. It's not even a step towards solving the problem.
How about the mobile network providers first stop robbing them blind with numerous scams and offers with hidden costs and ambiguous claims?
"New offer! Reduce your call charge to .9 Rs per 60 seconds when when you charge[1] for 350 Rs".
--Charges with 350 Rs.--
"Congratulations. Now you just need to charge again to enjoy the offer you just paid 350 Rs for!!"
Yes, that is the kind of exploitation that can happen with things like this, and there is not one damn thing that the poor can do about it.
[1]. Around here in India, "Charging" refers to adding prepaid talk time to a mobile connection often by purchasing a coupon.
They have similar nonsense in Mexico, Carlos Slim (incidentally the majority shareholder of the NY Times) make billions off of the backs of the poor in Mexico. The cell phone costs in Mexico are more expensive than in the US. So when adjusted by purchasing power, cell phones represent a huge financial burden on those least able to afford it but most likely to need it (due to decayed or non-existent telecom infrastructure in many parts of the country.)
If you want to see the effects of limiting competition (especially on the poor), Mexico is a case study. Before the Downvote Brigade starts naming Telcel competitors, one must remember that Carlos had an over 5 year monopoly on telecoms in Mexico before other market entrants were allowed to join the market, so essentially Carlos Slim and Co. were able to own the market before they had to compete, however by the time competition happened, they had a massive head start. Slim also owns/controls Telmex giving him almost total control of the internet infrastructure (and land lines) as well as cellular infrastructure. Mexico is a place where your cell phone plan might include "5 SMS messages a month" as part of your plan. That's right, 5. There's a reason WhatsApp just went nuts down there.
I doubt that's true: can you substantiate that? How was the EeePC a copy of OLPC? The only commonality was that they were cheap (for the time). I'd say the cheaper laptops are as a result of a confluence of things: Android, the battle between ARM vs. Intel Atom, a glut of TFTs the high- and mid-range won't accept,
[1]: http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users-by-country/
Let the poor speak. Oh wait they can't access internet!
[1] http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2015/01/28/bill-and-melin...
Then you need to purchase and read the excellent book _The Master Switch_ by Tim Wu. It is a book length answer to your specific question.
IMO, this is the key argument against Internet.org. Internet needs to be decentralized to truly remain a populist medium. Facebook knowingly or unknowingly is sowing the seeds for fracturing and killing off free, unrestricted access to the internet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish
Doesn't Zuck have enough of the Internet?
Well he needs something else as facebook as we know it will be dead in 10-15 years
He seems to be a good job of trying to control EVERYTHING.
You can't blurt out a statement like that without giving any explanation.
I _think_ that what Facebook is seeing is that social networks as a huge monolith is dying, that youth is abandoning it first in favor of specialized, niche networks. It's common psychology, really. Youth never enjoyed hanging around with their parents. If parents use Facebook to talk, they'd rather pick something else, like Kik.
Google is seeing it with Google+, which turned into a social network for photographers and geeks, so nowadays they mostly just pump out new photography oriented features.
I think they're careful to say it though since it might indicate a weakness in their strategy, a problem for advertisers:
> “I feel photos are the lifeblood of our service,” said Google+ lead Bradley Horowitz during the conference in 2012. “They are the way we can most immediately and viscerally connect as human beings.”
They're careful to say "photos" are the lifeblood, not "photographers".
Anyway, I think that within as little as five years ahead, we'll still see Facebook a very big company, but many smaller services. If that strategy is successful, I think we'll keep seeing Facebook as a big company for the foreseeable future. I don't think they'll be dead in 10 years, definitely not. But I do think people will barely know they're hanging around on Facebook and they'll have apps for all common demographies.
The only somewhat useful exception is Yahoo! and they have reinvented themselves many times.
Yes, anecdotal, but not blurted out.
(Examples that are dead or in severe decline: Tripod, Geocities, Blogger, Orkut, Myspace, etc.)
"Oh, our eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Net,
We are ramping up our market share, objectives will be met.
Soon our browser will be everywhere, you ain't seen nothin' yet,
We embrace and we extend!"
Battle Hymn of the Reorg
Anonymous Microsoft employee
MicroNews, the in-house newsletter
I can imagine Facebook would have thrived on AOL or MSN (or teletext). Zuck wouldn't have been able to start it from his college room though.
In the end, yes, they did fail. But untill that day, they managed to stiffle progress and do great harm to otherwise good and valuable initiatives and technologies.
So, even if internet.org will fail at some point in future, it has a great potential for harm untill that day.
Eventually yes. But Microsoft was top dog for years and kept the internet back.
Getting any bits there and back at all is the hard and expensive part. A forum full of people who make a living because the internet is an open, p2p network, and we are really in favor of turning it into a TV with only one channel for billons of people just so Facebook can get a better ROI?
Congratulations: your next startup won't be viable in third world countries and your job is safe from all those people who might start their own start up or learn to code there.
Make no mistake: this is business development, not charity.
> Any data (e.g., proxy requests) or reporting we provide is deemed Facebook confidential information and cannot be used by you for any advertising purposes or shared with third parties.
So they are putting a giant adblock on all of the internet.org sites? How is that in any way neutral/productive/fair?
You're assuming that that won't change? Countries won't gain capital influence? You don't think that might affect spending habits & advertisers won't adjust? You really want to make that bet?
This is probably related to the fact that they don't have quite a few of the items that those in other parts of the world take for granted.
Mobile phones, refrigerators, television sets, household items of all shapes & sizes as well as vehicles are very high on the list of desirables and any substantial income tends to be converted into stuff.
In countries where infrastructure is weak a mobile phone is a lot of things at once and so it tends to be very high on the list of things to acquire, a refrigerator (provided you have power regularly) is a way to save money and all the other things in that list signal 'status', something humans all over the world are sensitive to, the third world is definitely no exception in this respect.
Even in non developing countries plenty of people spend money on stuff they can barely afford rather than on their health or the quality of their food.
> If people don’t have disposable income
Oh, hold on there Bob, you've jumped from one assertion to another. What makes you think that people in third-world countries don't have disposable income?
You didn't answer the question.
Oftentimes, other languages or undeveloped areas are MORE profitable because there's less competition.
Also, I laid out out how it might actually CHANGE - which was a direct response to your question "why would it change?" Now you're asserting it very well might change?
I don't understand your argument.
The ammount of money that can be made in the thirld world is staggering. Another case of shlep blindness?
That is what credit cards are for..To buy things you don't really need, with money you don't really have...
You know that many practices, like price dumping (having preditorially low prices of things) is illegal for the obvious reasons? In a price-dumping kind of way, do you see how what Facebook is doing could be very bad?
You seem to have skipped a lot of specifics.
The analogy would be closer to the Rockefeller relationship with Oil. They controlled the entire system (and was eventually found to be a monopoly and broken up).
The above comment wasn't meant to say that Facebook is going to do harm (intentional), but that it's "harmful" (for the overall internet ecosystem) for Facebook to control internet access (for close to 2B people) like this.
[1] please don't take this comment down a "series of tubes."
On the other hand, I agree that we are going to see some awful things as a result of internet.org activities.
From my personal view as an employee of one corp, it all comes down how people are rewarded/motivated to get things done. If short term profit is the king, morals are not so much part of the equation, resulting in all kinds of mess. Exceptions do happen, but they are what they are - exceptions...
Even if an employee is in charge of the big decisions, still no dice. No one of them can decide "Choice A makes more money, but choice B is the moral one" and make choice B without repercussion. Said repercussion usually being firing, demotion or career derailing. Then you get somebody in their position who WILL make the profit decision.
Everyone in a company is responsible to the board, who are responsible to the stockholders, who are individually interested in profit only (by definition).
Money is not just money, it equals to power as well, so those with the majority will rule.
Money is in that sense not directly harmful, but misunderstanding that companies have their own agendas is rather harmful.
My guess is they are optimizing for long term revenue, ie avoiding an indian vkontakte.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6jGeIwebvk
Giving away free stuff isn't enough. People feel entitled to the best stuff for free, not just the free stuff you gave them. And if you offer the alternative of "then don't use the free stuff we're trying to give you" all you'll do is make them more angry at you.
You just can't stop people from looking a gift horse in the mouth.
Thats a distortion of the the way Zuckerberg presents the effort though. He seems to really want to give the impression that this is about helping people— and not about the power of being the filter through which all information and commerce has to flow. The poor in India etc will almost surely have the option of giving up their free plan and paying for the Internet, and then Facebook will have just served as a stepping stone and aid along the way to 'full' Internet access.
Apps like UC Browser and Opera Mini have been doing it even before we had smartphones. I still use UC Browser here as 2G is really slow. So the bandwidth used will be miniscule.
It's definitely possible for Facebook. In fact they've almost done it. The fact that they won't go the extra step and still insist on calling it "Internet.org" makes me suspicious of their intentions.
Let them go ahead. Call it Facebook.org and cut out the sanctimonious tone of pretending that it's charity.
Yes it would, the entire point of the project is to make a subset low-bandwidth standard. Highly optimized from server all the way to device. By not encrypting it they can even use multicast and caching.
When you visit an internet.org site, your phone wont load 30 tracking js files from 30 different companies. It will load the text of the page.
For all practical purposes, all of the cost for providing internet services at scale is in the last mile. In other words, it would not cost internet.org anything significant to extend the service to cover the whole internet. It makes very little difference in cost whether they backhaul the traffic to their datacenter or their closest peering point.
If the requirement is to only provide a low bandidth service then it is trivial to restrict the bandwidth usage per end-user, even if it provides access to the whole internet.
I feel a bit that people complaining about this service are self-serving. People here are complaining about things that affect them (potential future internet directions) and because of these effects millions (maybe even a billion) should be denied a free service.
I feel very, very uncomfortable with that viewpoint.
This is not going to happen the way the Indian telecoms are screwing up Net Neutrality. Internet.org is only part of the problem. Indian telecoms want to charge extra for OTT (over the top) services. This includes many internet messaging (ex: whatsapp) and VOIP (ex: skype) services. Internet.org sets a bad precedent where the telecoms can come up with various packages that are "free" while charging exorbitant amounts of money for the rest of the internet.
But your response is definitely the best argument against it I've seen.
They knew the license terms when they bid for the spectrum. One of the approved uses is providing internet service, and the license agreement (UASL) specifically says that this entails providing access to all legal websites and services on the internet.
While the intent is clear, it isn't as detailed as net neutrality legislation in other countries — which is why campaigners want new regulations or legislation with similar clarity as laws in Brazil, Chile or the FCC's rules.
Now the question is why should some business be treated as utility, it is because they control access to limited natural resource, which somewhat prevents free competition
The tariff and regulatory structure of telephony is different from internet access. "Telephony Neutrality" basically says that you can call anybody you like as long as you can afford it and you are free to receive phone calls from anybody.
Internet.org is thus more like: "you can call these toll free numbers, but you cannot receive calls from anybody we haven't preapproved".
There is nothing magical about the IP address of internet.org that makes packets to and from it special. Hence zerorating should be applied to either all IP addresses or none.
1) I don't quite know how to parse this. The EFF isn't characterizing the internet.org plan the same way FB is? It's a FB initiative, and EFF are watchdogs. Should I expect them to share opinions & metrics of value?
2) See also: "Millions of Facebook users have no idea they’re using the internet" - Quartz article discussing the fact that many people don't understand the technical underpinnings (and thus, power dynamics) of the web/internet/API-based applications: http://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-ide...
I'm really glad the EFF is making a broader audience aware of some of these issues.
I'm fine with balanced opinions but there is no need to do the back and forth multiple times through the same article.
They're trying to make some very serious criticisms without detracting too much from the fact that Internet.org actually got off their arses to do something about the digital divide.
I think its fair. They're trying to give some degree of credit where its due, as opposed to an all out attack. Its hard for me personally to agree with an all out attack piece when I'm conscious of the seemingly good intentions of the project (conspiracies aside).
We have confidence that it would be possible to provide a
limited free Internet access service that is secure, *and
that doesn't rely on Facebook and its partners to
maintain a central list of approved sites*. Until then,
Internet.org will not be living up to its promise, or its name.
On one hand, you are helping them compared to how others treat them. On the other hand, you are exploiting them for your own gain.
Even ignoring the morals of offering a bad deal to someone who only has worse deals to choose from, there is the fear that such an actor would eventually evolve to lock out others who want to help without (or with less) exploitation.
Supply the poor with open free internet.
Oh wait, then you'd have to stop being a bunch of whiny privileged people and spend your own time and, god forbid some of your own money helping the poor.
Helping the true poor is going to have a catch, there is no utopian society that's going to do it instead, grow up.
Television, which is generally consider to be very positive in impoverished countries, especially around issues like equality, had ads.
And the stations lock users down to their content often using monopolies in radio spectrum. All the while the world goes on as it always does, helping not at all.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8171477
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9203946
What they can do, however, is severely limit the bandwidth this way; it's not net-neutral at all, but tunneling does effectively break out of the walled garden.
I know it will probably be an unpopular view here, but I actually quite like the approaches taken by Australia (where I grew up) and Thailand (where I live and run my business now)
In Australia you have to be a registered non-profit to get a .org.au domain, and you have to have an ABN or ACN to get a .com.au or .net.au. In the case of commercial domains, while it isn't checked at registration, if your domain name isn't somehow related to your company/brand name, (or even if it is and you aren't using it actively) you can lose it.
In Thailand, your .co.th domain name must match your company name - e.g. if you have HappyHamburger Co., Ltd, you can only register happyhamburger.co.th - this means new companies don't need to rush out and make sure they get the domain matching their company name (or even that it might be taken) to prevent squatters.
For Thailand, you would use the .in.th suffix.
Note however, that in Australia - any individual can apply for an ABN and if you're a freelancer or otherwise self-employed in Australia, you would need an ABN to issue tax invoices anyway.
Well, they don't have to be perfect; they just have to be better than humans. And it turns out that's pretty easy.
So maybe rather than beat up on internet.org because it's not free as in perfection, maybe we should be happy that a billion dollar corporation is trying to do SOMETHING to help 4 billion people who can't afford the current option.
It doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be better, for those billions of people with no access to the internet, than having nothing at all. And I think they are meeting that and far above it.
But that’s as if I were to tell you that giving anti-malarial drugs to people is wrong, because the right thing to do is to eradicate malaria itself. That’s probably true, but the practical thing to do right now is what’s good, not necessarily what’s right. And you can work on both fronts at once: they’re orthogonal.
I don’t pretend to understand the massive logistical challenges involved in implementing this, and it makes me sigh when others no more knowledgeable than myself make armchair proclamations about what should or should not be done.
If it were only so. I would have no issue with internet.org if they provided free basic internet access. They do not, and this is a VERY important distinction. Internet.org is a gated community with a gatekeeper and no security. It is like AOL or an intranet. It is by definition limited, excluding and discriminatory. It is very much not free basic internet.
> But that’s as if I were to tell you that giving anti-malarial drugs to people is wrong, because the right thing to do is to eradicate malaria itself.
The malaria analogy is a straw man. The resources and effort required to eradicate malaria are vastly larger than the effort and resources required to distribute anti-malaria drugs to a group of infected people. If they were the same it would obviously be both good and right to eradicate malaria. However, they are not.
The effort and resources to provide a gated internet.org and the effort and resources to provide an open internet.org are the same. Thus it is both good and right to provide an open internet.org.
> I don’t pretend to understand the massive logistical challenges involved in implementing this, and it makes me sigh when others no more knowledgeable than myself make armchair proclamations about what should or should not be done.
Unlike you, I do know what I am talking about having made a career in the telecoms industry.
Feeling good about internet.org is about as smart as feeling good about price dumping. All short turn gain for long term loss. Or if you feel like a more concrete example, it's about as smart as pissing in your pants when you are cold.
There is no "basic" Internet access with a limited number of sites in the same sense that one can get "basic" cable with a limited number of channels. That's not Internet access. Calling it Internet access is disingenuous on the part of Internet.org, and providing it in the first place is destructive to the long-term interests of the intended beneficiaries.
What's both "good" and "right" is providing bandwidth-limited access to the entire Internet, subsidized if necessary by the local ads shown on a non-prioritized, low-bandwidth-friendly localized version of Facebook.
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:...
With strings attached. It's like giving someone money & telling "you can only buy products that I approve of...". (Missing fine print: we will track you and trap you into buying these for as long as we can).
No matter how much they twist the motivations, given their history, I've no faith in them doing any good, except for their bank accounts. It's one company that has shown utter disregard for the privacy of their users.
The primary aim of internet.org is to map and build a deep graph of every living being and bolster Facebook's monopoly. In the short term, some might applaud the "free" internet carrot but the whole concept is detrimental to innovation in the long term. Either provide "real" internet without any strings attached, or else don't be surreptitious about your intentions and claim to do it for the good of humanity.
Billions of people would be happy accessing the free-but-limited internet and wouldn't have any privacy concerns. However their privacy isn't the only issue here. The problem is that these people would be unknowingly contributing to the success of the walled garden developed by FB & friends. In the future, companies aligned with them will have access to a trove of data & eyeballs. Those that aren't aligned or want to compete with them, would be shut out. This is anti-competitive. One might argue that without internet.org, these people would not have contributed anyway. However, the premise of "free" will result in a lot of paying customers to switch. And, many of those who don't have an internet connection today, might get one in the near future. One that's low speed and perhaps subsidized by the government. To understand that, you have to look at the growth rate of mobiles in 3rd world countries. The bottom of the pyramid does contribute to the success of many tier-3 cellphone manufacturers. There are people who earn less than a dollar a day but they stay connected with a mobile phone. With a connection that's not limited by any corporation.
As the old saying goes, "there's no such thing as free ...". One way or the other, someone has to pay for the internet. It's not going to come out of the FB shareholders pockets. The question we need to ask is, who is actually paying for it and what's the actual cost (not literal cost) to this freebie.
It would be a lot better if the government or a neutral organization like Mozilla takes up this initiative. I would be happy to contribute to an initiative that provides free or subsidized internet to the masses. An internet, where there's no restriction on which site you can visit. An internet, where nobody will track you or collect your data or re-sell it.
Which is basically how large parts of 'development aid' are structured : we offer you $100m if you spend at least 70% in the country of origin ( of the money ).
"Can only be used for food" is a restriction, but indeed not one that goes beyond "food stamps are for food" which isn't obviously a crazy principle.
But some places go further. In Kansas this (which takes effect in July of this year) http://kslegislature.org/li/b2015_16/measures/documents/hb22... says:
> No TANF cash assistance shall be used in any retail liquor store, casino, gaming establishment, jewelry store, tattoo parlor, massage parlor, body piercing parlor, spa, nail salon, lingerie shop, tobacco paraphernalia store, vapor cigarette store, psychic or fortune telling business, bail bond company, video arcade, movie theater, swimming pool, cruise ship, theme park, dog or horse racing facility, parimutuel facility, or sexually oriented business or any retail establishment which provides adult-oriented entertainment in which performers disrobe or perform in an unclothed state for entertainment, or in any business or retail establishment where minors under age 18 are not permitted. TANF cash assistance transactions for cash withdrawals from automated teller machines shall be limited to $25 per transaction and to one transaction per day. No TANF cash assistance shall be used for purchases at points of sale outside the state of Kansas.
(Note that TANF is not the same thing as "food stamps".)
In Missouri this bill http://www.house.mo.gov/billtracking/bills151/billpdf/intro/... is awaiting discussion (I have no idea how likely it is to pass). It would forbid the use of SNAP (which is the same as "food stamps") for "cookies, chips, energy drinks, soft drinks, seafood, or steak".
This is probably none of your business.
That being said, it would be nice to engineer a way to meet the bandwidth and content requirements without losing cryptographic integrity, but that's of secondary importance to getting another billion people reading Wikipedia.
If "good enough" displaces or prevents real and open internet access from becoming a reality for all users then it is a very bad thing.
People making these arguments have never been to 3rd world countries, I assume.
Privacy comes at the top of Maslow's pyramid, we are talking about basic needs here.
This has nothing to do with basic needs of the recipients and everything to do with cementing Facebook's stranglehold on social networking in the developing world. There's no "next step" from here that would make Internet.org a reasonable path on a community's technological development -- this is a dead end.
When you buy medicine it makes the pharmaceutical companies cement their stranglehold in medicine world.
Beside the above obvious point, the real point is not whether there is a benefit to providing access to Wikipedia with strings attached. The real point is this: are we giving up more than we are getting if we consent to Facebook zero rating some content and putting up walls to deny access to everything else?
My personal option is that the bargain is very bad for all parties involved.
If Facebook wants to do real philanthropy, they should do it right. Develop and distribute an android app that will disable internet communication for all the apps (user controlled) and will only connect to the free services.
http://www.trust.org/slideshow/?id=356b4ab3-7e12-440f-9781-b...
> > Abdul Salam, a 47-year-old Rohingya, asks a friend in Malaysia for advice [...]. His friend Muhammad Rafiq, a Rohingya in Thae Chaung village, has a son held by traffickers, and they are raising the money to pay the ransom. Abdul Salam's question is: How can he be sure the trafficker, once paid, will let the boy go?