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Comment by thewarrior | Hacker News Reader

Then why can't Facebook give bandwidth instead of access to a limited number of sites. They're already doing it for a few. It wouldn't cost them anything to extend it to the whole internet.

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.

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>It wouldn't cost them anything to extend it to the whole internet.

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.

I'm replying to you from UC Browser . It strips all JS and converts everything to plain HTML thats only a few KB. This is nothing new and has been done by many other players.

You are mistaken about the cost structure of the internet.

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.

Well the problem is that carriers would never agree to such a deal. It would, for instance, make generalized instant-messaging work and destroy their SMS revenue. It would also eat into their "real internet" revenues. I doubt the problem there is Facebook.

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.

Facebook provides messaging, so internet.org will eat into SMS revenue. Carriers might be able to keep call revenue if they don't allow Facebooks' messenger app.

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