Indian here. The manipulation has been incredibly blatant and scummy. It's not even funny anymore. Friends who categorically denied having sent a mail to the Indian telecom regulatory authority on Facebook's behalf (conveniently supplied by Facebook) show up on my feed as having signed the mail.
It's an all-out blitzkrieg. I've seen full page ads in newspapers, banners at bus stops, even ads on local Indian websites.
It's one of the scummiest things I've seen from a major company.
WTF. "Free basic" .. It's two way communication. It's not like fucking 1994 where free TV involved four neighbours going on a satellite dish so you could get 6 channels.
Free Basic....get only the limited things we want you to have and the companies who are willing to pay for it. Fuck. That. Shit.
Want to do something that will actually help people; what about Free 1GB. Ensure every person gets 1GB of mobile data a month. Then they can go anywhere...use healthcare, government, facebook or....porn. or whatever the fuck they want. I agree, Free Basic is total bullshit.
This seems to be a upping the ante from Facebook, as a response to the earlier petitions against internet.org and zero-rated apps.
I feel so angry at their persistence in this case. My feeling at this time is for the SaveTheInternet petitioners to also up the ante in return, by starting a movement to get people off Facebook.
As such it was lucky that WhatsApp founders did not have the bxxls to wait another year, when they could have acquired FB instead. All my school friends use WhatsApp more over here. And recently I am seeing increasing no. of people sign up on Telegram. (WhatsApp groups suck, that's another story, but kind of suggest that social networks are far from done. FB is perhaps the version 0.1 in social network maturity)
We should convey a clear message to Facebook, play fair or pack up. Early. I am glad I did not login to that stupid thing for over 3 months now.
PS: I have signed this petition as well as at least one earlier. I request other people based in India to do the same.
It doesn't sound any different than what Facebook does regularly. "X likes Y, do you want to like it?", ask X in person, they never liked Y.
Facebook, despite the fact I use it, is a slimy ad platform that creates stories at the expense of those that use it. I mean they "market their customer usage".
I've yet to see an explanation for the fictitious likes.
I'd prefer to hear the unadulterated version as well. It seems like most publications are ran through various filters and handlers before it makes it out to his website.
heck they have even started Youtube adverts now! http://imgur.com/FqrQQm4 How can we face such a force who has every means of media communication to dupe people?
From my Indian friends on Facebook, it appears Facebook is showing messages that certain friends of yours are supporting, or signed up for Facebook basics, even if they never did anything of the sort.
It's creepy, and messed up.
Edit: (Leaving the original post untouched), it appears Facebook will show you as having supported Free Basics if you clicked polls which seemed completely unrelated (as the original article points out, polls about "Connected India" for example. Still quite a distance from having supported Free basics, which is what Facebook appears to show.
Ah yes, the new propaganda of the 21st century: the corporations try to convince you that all your friends are supporting their proposals, and so, you should too. It works. The single most important thing for most humans is being accepted by their confederates.
Pay close attention: the corporations have no scruples about manipulating you to get their way, and Facebook is no exception.
A conciliatory response to this deception from Zuck himself is warranted; this kind of lie-distribution (to over a billion people) shouldn't be accepted quietly. Furthermore, if Zuck wants his philanthropy efforts to succeed, lying to a billion people to support his company is going to torpedo it.
My friends kind of know me as a supporter of net neutrality and I was horrified when two of them shared with me their notification screenshots which was showing me as supporting Facebook "Free Basics".
Even if this is entirely well-intentioned, which is certainly up for debate, it sets a precedent that will eventually see the world's most powerful media corporations become gatekeepers of the internet.
The web has been so successful because of any one of us can fire up a text editor and create the next phenomenon without spending a single dollar or seeking anyone's permission.
Let us not judge from Intellectual Ivory towers, the facts on the ground are 80% of Indians do not have internet access. You sometimes have to try "impure" methods. The question is still up in the air, whether FB Basics is gateway to full internet or if it is a walled garden. Either way, it is better than No Access. The immediate retort I get is, why not facebook provide free internet access to poor. Guys, is it their responsibility to give internet connection without any thing in return? How about asking that to your IAS uncle? or Politician neighbor.
The Net Neutrality activists of India, are bunch of middle class disconnected from poor activists. They think their idealogical purity is paramount than a dirty limited connection for the poor.
I am afraid populism will one more time win the day, while NN activists take a victory lap, the India's poor now will not have any form of connectivity.
> Let us not judge from Intellectual Ivory towers,
Labeling someone who disagrees with you as being in an "ivory tower" is basically an ad-hominem. Argue the merits, not the source.
> the facts on the ground are 80% of Indians do not have internet access. You sometimes have to try "impure" methods. The question is still up in the air, whether FB Basics is gateway to full internet or if it is a walled garden. Either way, it is better than No Access.
What if a pharma company came and said, "you know, this medicine causes birth defects, but it's OK to push it on Indians because 80% lack decent medication"... would you be for it?
India is making tremendous progress in bringing connectivity to the people. I grew up in an India where telephones were so scarce, that the waiting list for a landline phone was more than 10 years. People in villages had absolutely no access to phones at all; reaching a phone meant taking a bus/train to the nearest big town, and going to a PCO.
And yet today, almost everyone has a cellphone.
By pushing this "walled garden" to the people, FB will capture the market and derail the train of progress. FB has the ability to pay local carriers; but does HN?
I see this as a false dilemma. Internet access in India is already cheap enough to be near the cost of a phone over its effective lifetime. To quote the linked post:
> Given that data packages cost as little as Rs. 20 a month while phones cost Rs. 2,000 and up, we think their thesis itself is flawed
So the group that free basics can help to get online are those for whom the cost of a phone is feasible but paying the cost of a phone ×2 or ×3 for internet access is not. This is a relatively narrow fraction of the population.
Activists in India see that there are other reasonable alternatives to connect the entire population of the country that do not encourage the digital enslavement of their poor. The simplest one is a marginal improvement of per capita income that is driven by the people of the country itself, not exploitative "charity" from a foreign company. In very short order this, and the decreasing cost of technology will allow the whole net to reach everyone who could benefit today from free basics.
The false dilemma "better this than nothing" comes from a distant ivory tower that does not respect the capacity and future of the people of these developing nations. There are other ways to full access that do not sacrifice human rights.
This is an extremely short-sighted view. There is no question that connectivity is a vital resource necessary for equality and that we want everyone to have access to the internet. The question is how we expand the network to them and — most importantly — who pays for it?
A network paid for by foreign business interests and advertisers is fundamentally different than a network paid for by its users. But even though the foundation is different, they are in many ways substitute goods, meaning the presence of one will inhibit the popularity of the other. By the most basic economic reasoning, Free Basics will hurt the spread of user-funded peer-to-peer networks like the internet, just as distributing free clothing will hurt a local textile industry.
Based on that model, we can also predict the more fundamental difference between the two networks to be in the details w.r.t. privacy interests, not limited access.
There are better ways of giving out Internet for free. By giving out slower internet. Or internet with a free data cap. Or a way of "earning" Internet data after watching some ads (see: Grameenphone in Bangladesh). I'd somewhat agree with the "Some Internet is better than No internet" argument, except that there are better ways of doing the "some Internet" which Facebook isn't doing.
> why not facebook provide free internet access to poor.
Facebook isn't even paying for the data in Free Basics. The telecom operators are (I assume their business plan is to get more people hooked onto the Internet so eventually more customers for them. A valid plan.). They can use the same business plan (in a net neutral way) for the slower internet or internet with a data cap options; and I believe that's what Aircel is doing.
(Aside: When you look at it this way it becomes even more obvious how devious Facebook is here -- without putting in money of their own to finance the actual data, they, a third party, jumped in and convinced telecom operators to enact a scheme which Facebook has a lot of control over despite not being the primary financers of the scheme. They get lots of credit and lots of control, without actually doing anything. When framed this way the parallels with the Brits' takeover of India seem a lot more real.)
And really, the "no access" part of your argument isn't really well founded either. For most, data plan costs aren't the barrier to internet access (in fact, a smartphone capable of working with the modern internet[1] is more expensive than a few years' worth of basic data).
[1]: Fun fact: Facebook's mobile app evolves pretty fast and becomes unusable on older phones either due to browser compatibility, OS compatibility, or speed issues. Same with many other sites and apps.
The problem is once you've tried this "impure" method there is no turning back. Once an ISP finds out they can offer some apps free but make other apps count towards data usage, the whole nature of the internet changes. Note that zero-rating is just one aspect of what mobile networks want to do; before the explosive activism in March, they were being more flagrant and trying to charge extra for each WhatsApp message or add extra charges for Skype calls.
> the facts on the ground are 80% of Indians do not have internet access
The facts on the ground for everywhere in the world not too long ago was worse than 20% access to the Internet. And I bet the current 20% Indian Internet users have much much faster connections than dial-up.
Things change. Fast. It is disingenuous to ignore the natural connectivity growth trajectory and focus on today's number only. Most will get connected to the Internet, with or without Facebook's "help" soon. The danger is with Facebook's "help", they'll get connected to FBNet (Free Basics Network, aka ZuckNet), diverting them away from connecting to the real Internet.
The question is still up in the air, whether FB Basics is gateway to full internet or if it is a walled garden.
I think it's a gateway to popularising tunneling; as long as FB lets those using FB Basics and those accessing FB from the full Internet communicate, you can still send information through. It's just like using FB as a proxy. Given that and what I know about Indian ingenuity, I predict a lot more hacks like this will appear:
So I suppose in some respects you could think of FB Basics as a very heavily throttled full Internet connection. You could even argue that FB and all the other companies giving "free" non-net-neutral access is driving incentive to hack around these restrictions, which I think is not at all a bad thing.
New people connect to the Internet every day. This billion (really?) people might very well all be connected to the real Internet in ten years. Maybe this Facebook push can get them connected to FacebookNet in five years. Is that a good thing? Probably not, if history is any guide.
I'd like to know of the engineers/team in the chain of command who is responsible for the "Something went wrong" flag set on savetheinternet.in : http://i.imgur.com/K3JUack.png
Clearly this flag was not set on the grounds of pornography/violent matter/malicious link. This flag was instead set on a what is political speech, representing activists from a large swath of a democratic nation.
Consider how big of an attack this is on speech. Consider if a prominent website of any other political thought were thus flagged, and warned users away from.
To any folks from facebook reading this: please point out the team/engineers and the whole chain of command responsible for this flag -- this suppression is not a tiny thing.
That looks like a link where facebook has replaced the link to the website with their own URL for tracking purposes. As a consequence they have to prevent open redirect attacks - https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Open_redirect .
Yes the same system can be used for censorship - but facebook can do that anyway because you're sharing links through a platform they have total control over.
The irony (of using a facebook tracking url to promote an anti-facebook site) is beautiful.
Hey, that's my screenshot. I can't edit my comment below any more but I think this is misleading – other links to savetheinternet.in work fine from facebook (try it yourself). There are a lot of other scammy things going on that are more important than this small technical issue, I'd delete my comment if I could.
they were even suppressing a popular Indian youtube comedy channel's take on this issue when it was released. And yes, fb does internally censor things which they dont like, for eg they were actively blocking tsu.co, a rival social network url in their platform until it hit the media and they had to backtrack
Coming from a rural farming community in India i think this is a very bad deal. I speak with my folks when i visit India about how they use technology. The use cases are very practical such as turning off/on the pumpset, since the fields are far and the power comes and goes at different times, this kind of app is amazing. I can think of similar use cases once IoT takes off. ex: Checking the water levels in paddy fields (The crabs make holes and if you are out of luck all the water is gone, resulting in midnight trips to fields to make sure everything is fine). The startups which might provide these kind of services will do well only if the internet is free, else FB will build its own apps to do this. FB will have a monopoly over the future use cases. The last thing my folks back home need is to play farmville or poke at each other or put booty shots in instagram :)
It seems kind of a mixed deal for that stuff. Apparently you can submit your app to use free basics and stuff like you mention should qualify. On the other hand it's easier to put a service on the regular web than to have to apply to Facebook. Actually hacking free basics might be good for things like checking the water levels - you could get a cheap phone pointed at the tank with an app to look at the water, use Facebook's data and enjoy the knowledge that that phone isn't going to be pokeing or candy-crushing.
I am weary of the gatekeepers, they can change the rules when they want. What would really help from a long term perspective is to provide very low cost data plans, this might not happen if we go the free basics route since telcos have vested interest in keeping the free basics forever by jacking up the cost of data plans.
I don’t have much to add after the last couple threads on this (my concerns boil down to the importance of net neutrality, and the obscuring way free Facebook plus a few dozen apps is presented as philanthropy) but it’s interesting that after 36 countries, as they say, “embraced” internet.org, India may finally be where Mark Zuckerberg’s ambitions run aground.
We have a specific mix of an established tech ecosystem, educated middle class, and active (though imperfect) democracy, all of which combined to spark a grassroots movement for net neutrality. I hope we can resist Facebook’s lobbying, whether visible marketing like this or backroom deals with telecom networks and governments.
P.S. Not to mention the aspect I’ve seen many people bring up: a Western corporation trying to aggressively meddle in India has an unhappy precedent.
>a Western corporation trying to aggressively meddle in India has an unhappy precedent.
Are you referring to the East India Company as the linked article does? Please be clear, I am not familiar enough with Indian history, and I've seen no-one else bring it up on this page.
Companies. There were several - British, Swedish French, Dutch, Portuguese, you name it.
The British ended up taking the rest over, but practically every European colonial power had their own East India Company at one point or another (or tried to) and they all competed on how best to exploit the resources they could extract from India.
If I understand this right, it means poor people don't actually get the Internet. They get Facebook. Ergo it's a regression back to pre-Internet "Prodigy" and "Compuserve" and "AOL" only days, for poor people. And then they get piles of ads in their face. It's not really the Internet. So is that better than nothing? I think that's up to the users to decide rather than people who have the real Internet.
But I also think it's misleading to refer to this as "digital equality" or that Facebook and friends constitutes "essential internet services." The only essential Internet service is the fucking connection to the unabridged Internet. So call it what it actually is. Don't exaggerate (lie).
EDIT: I don't use Facebook, at all. I have tons of friends who don't use it, at all. So how "essential" is it? I'm completely OK with them giving free Facebook + only whatever else they want, but it's b.s. to call this essential or basic. It's not even really free if people are getting ad bombed to pay for it.. So yeah, let people have whatever this is, it's fine, but don't lie/mislead about what it is.
Facebook is doing its best to stop people from accessing this as well -- if I click a link to that website from Facebook, I get a message that seems designed to stop me from going ahead. It says, "Something Went Wrong. Sorry, there was a problem with this link: http://www.SaveTheInternet.in/
You can now continue to this website, or go back to the page you were on before. Remember, only follow links from sources you trust."
This evokes memories of colonialism. Most Indians I know are like "gtfo we don't need your help" and Zuckerberg is going like "well I'm going to help you whether you like it or not."
It is SO obvious he's doing it to make sure Facebook has a permanent hold on the huge and growing Indian market. But to disguise it as a charity, that's scummy as anything I've seen a major company do.
First let's keep affordability aside and think about this.
Internet is built on principles of neutrality. It is built on public property (airways, land) that government leases to companies on our behalf.
Internet is what it is today because of this neutrality principle. It has given rise to so many companies out of nothingness and created so much opportunity for disruption and growth. So any
We do not want to turn Internet into something useless and backwards (like cable/tv networks). That is what Facebook is trying to do here by lobbying the government to change policy. This has to be stopped no question.
Now let's talk about affordability.
Government should look into programs that will lower the overall cost of Internet by reforming how they license spectrum.
They can also provide free access to Internet in public places - like public schools, public libraries, train/bus stations, agri markets etc where most information hungry people who cannot afford are already there. They can also encourage large city/town center operators to provide free wifi.
All said, most poor people in India who don't have Internet are in tier-2/3 cities and villages where there is no connectivity at all today. So, it is not a question of affordability but connectivity.
Facebook is being irresponsible and evil in this case and exploiting the situation and not doing anything to help. In contrast, google recently launched a program to provide high-speed Internet free wifi in 400 train stations in India. This is the largest public wifi program in the world.
Why not let "our less fortunate brothers" decided what they want. If they don't want free internet, then its their choice. How insane is it to let the TRAI regulate the internet! Do you not see the internet is the only real means of liberating people? And you want a group of elite people to control this! What happens to the "these airwaves belong to us" argument when the government bans anti-govt web sites or porn websites or any other websites that the current elite don't agree with? Down with intelligentsia!
'Why not let the customer choose' can also be a generic argument against almost any kind of regulation. Why not have less strict regulations for food safety, or airlines, so various competitors can offer differing levels of safety - and if it matters enpugh to people, they'll choose the (more expensive) options with more safety. Is that freedom or is it capitalist anarchy?
I would argue (as many do) that government regulations have a place in enforcing basic guarantees of safety and fairness. And net neutrality strikes me as very important to guarantee fairness, both in terms of freedom of speech and a level playing field for innovation.
"Why not let [the customer] choose" is an argument that can be made of any net neutrality debate.
Should there be fast-lanes in the US?
TWC: We'll offer plans with and without fast-lanes and let the customers choose!
Either the internet is the internet or it's not. Facebook wants to bring Facebook to rural villages? Fine, but they have to bring the whole internet with them.
Yes. Why not? Just like should there be expensive doctors, restaurants, entertainment, etc.? Obviously yes.
"Either the internet is the internet or it's not. Facebook wants to bring Facebook to rural villages? Fine, but they have to bring the whole internet with them."
My point is let the people in the rural villages decided wether they want Facebook internet or other forms of internet. Please don't decide on their behalf. It is very patronizing and antithetical to progess.
You mean like a company paying an ISP to place a server rack there and then reselling that server space branded as a Content Delivery Network to media companies who want their end consumers to have smoother experience (while the non-paying competition is stuck with "loading..." indicators)?
Indian here, they even started Television ads showing zuke. It is getting out of hand. There VP of Internet org will be doing an AMA on reddit today !!
finally more people are speaking about it. its sad to see facebook revert to cheap publicity stunt tactics to get their way around. I always had a good impression of FB specially for their open source tools which I use a lot, and I really hope they can put this murky event behind them and go back to the way they were.
Really? My first encounter with facebook was when I got spammed by a guy I barely knew, along with the rest of his email address book. I've always found the company to be slimy.
The company might be super slimy, but their engineering team has made huge improvements to the modern web / app development and had gifted us with the awesome open source tools. Only because of them I had a positive outlook of the company
Today I learned that Indians have a word for ten million (crore).
On a more serious note this facebook campaign is an embodiment of principles elucidated Zero to One. Competition sucks, argues Mr. Thiel, try to create a monopoly. And monopoly is great if you are a business but for customers it is other way round. I hope India will preserve open and competitive internet for its citizens.
The article states that the chief aim of this campaign is to prevent Indians from using google. Are there any signs of them taking countermeasures?
In "Zero to One", (which I just finished reading yesterday), Thiel actually argued that monopolies were good for both sides of the market, so long as the monopoly was achieved through excellence, and not just corruption or government-grant.
Okay, if an activist can contemplate a program giving everyone in India who wants it 500MB a month mobile bandwidth, then I have to call out western web app developers for committing a heinous crimes against global Internet access equality.
It used to be that I could get by with a 500MB plan on my iPhone, and so long as I avoided video streaming, I'd usually use 300MB. Now I see that my Maps apps alone use that in a month, and I run out of 6GB bandwidth every month.
It's a truism that bandwidth is like highway lanes: If it's there, it will be used. But really, am I getting more functionality for the increased bandwidth? I think not.
You're blaming devs because you us 6gb a month? That is a joke. I share 15gb with 6 people in my family and we've never gone over. Obviously you are doing something out of the ordinary.
The devs must have done something, because I haven't changed how I use Maps. How is it that Maps alone is using the entire allocation of the bandwidth I used to use in a month?
Interestingly, Wikimedia also engages in zero-rating, through their Wikipedia Zero program. But their motivations are genuinely altruistic. (After all, it brings them no direct benefit and costs them money.)
Wikipedia is a pretty shady organization. For years they have used server costs as one of the main reasons (and in the some cases the main reason) why people should donate. But their finance reports paint a very different picture. Their server costs reflect a very small percentage of their overall costs. They ask for way more money than they actually need. More money is spent on "investments" and fundraisers than is spent on the cost of maintaining the site. Some people have also alleged purposeful backlinking to their for profit sites. That is, adding and replacing links in wikipedia pages to point to websites that the wikipedia founders profit from. So using wikipedia as an example of "genuinely altruistic" motivation is a stretch. The founders of wikipedia do not benefit directly from their work, but they certainly benefit indirectly and through false advertising.
Wikimedia. They do a lot more than just the encyclopædia.
> For years they have used server costs as one of the main reasons (and in the some cases the main reason) why people should donate. But their finance reports paint a very different picture. Their server costs reflect a very small percentage of their overall costs.
Server costs are not the only thing they need to spend money on. Consider their budget for 2015-2016:
40% of that is spent on engineering. Someone needs to maintain MediaWiki.
~6% is spent on legal - they're a large site that has to deal with copyright issues, they need lawyers. ~15% is spent on administrative costs, as if you employ lots of people, you need to manage them.
> They ask for way more money than they actually need.
They could run on a leaner budget, yes, but it's not as if the other money they get is wasted. More money means they can hire more engineers to work on the site and improve it, for example.
> More money is spent on "investments" and fundraisers than is spent on the cost of maintaining the site.
Looking at that budget, they spend more on Engineering than on Community Engagement, Grants, Advancement, and Communications combined.
> Some people have also alleged purposeful backlinking to their for profit sites. That is, adding and replacing links in wikipedia pages to point to websites that the wikipedia founders profit from.
Could you provide evidence, or at least a credible source?
This is deception. Pure and simple. There are many different and ethical ways of providing connectivity to the poor but not at the cost of losing net neutrality.
I'm still mad that facebook hasn't unblocked the I Fucking Love Science page yet here in India. Why would anyone block a page about science while letting the religious bullshit/reposts runs rampant?
The real question is, will facebook lobby against, and attempt to disallow, free community / coop network access ?
It's one thing to trick a bunch of poor people into thinking you're giving them free Internet access ... it's still free.
It's quite another to then shackle them by manipulating their legal system into disallowing any other free options.
I have a lot on my plate right now, but it sure would be interesting to do a very small scale proof of concept free wifi mesh anywhere in India ... just to see who that pisses off ... I see my favorite bulk IP provider (he.net) has zero presence in India, so that doesn't make things quick and simple ... we'll see ...
Hundreds of millions of people in India don't even have access to electricity, let alone internet. The Indian government is extremely corrupt and over-regulating. They have failed to bring modernity to a billion people. That's the context here. From what I can tell, Free Basics is a market solution that will allow a bunch of self-interested parties to bring connectivity to people who would probably never get it otherwise.
If there are all of these other alternatives, why doesn't someone set them up as a competitor to Free Basics. No one would use a limited service like Free Basics if they had free access to "real" internet access.
What makes you think Free Basics is doing anything about electricity or connectivity? It is just zero-rating for Facebook & partner apps, riding on top of infrastructure and services built by existing telecom networks in the country with the "extremely corrupt" and "failed" government.
I think this could all be resolved by letting Facebook pay the cost, but if they're going to restrict where you can go, require that they are restricting it to a competitor. Twitter maybe? lesswrong? And first level outgoing links from those sources.
While I'm curious about the pros and cons of a gratis walled garden, was the greater offense the way Facebook used their presence to affect political change? Would it have been offensive to do so in an attempt to counteract pollution?
Yes. If it was an extremely self interested cleanup of only a certain kind of pollution which it would only help with on the condition that other more important kinds of pollution increased or got much less attention, and would lead to much worse long term consequences, and facebook was completelly scummy spamming everyone about "if you don't want this, you want babies to die of pollution."
If there are alternative ways to bring internet access to the billion unconnected Indians, then why does the Indian government need to ban Free Basics? Those alternatives can be set up in parallel. No one will use Free Basics if the alternative is free "real" internet access.
Over the next few years, someone should also look into how much of that "philanthropy" money is going into Internet.org from Zuckerberg - mainly because I'd hate for him to get away with most people believing he's giving away his fortune for the good of mankind, when in fact he'd just be propping up Facebook, but with fewer taxes on his money.
there was no mention of philanthropy, it was PR stunt.
All Zuckerburg did was move his wealth to a private LLC, it's the degenerate media and press that interpreted it as "philanthropy", probably to get some Likes on their FB post.
The Indian poor people may be poor but they are not fools. A substandard service will not take off just like Tata Nano car for the poor failed miserably so will this Facebook initiative.
is internet really going to help the 600 million people that practice open defecation? if they can't figure out that digging a hole where to poop is clearly better, how will they make good use of the internet and not get themselves manipulated.
India has a long history of reneging on deals. Once a deal is struck with most nations, that's it. Done deal. With India, they don't care - they'll do whatever is convenient for them.
Hell, even Russia and China won't back out of deals once struck. They'll piss and moan if it turns out they got the short end of the stick, but they'll still honor the deal.
I tell my clients to steer clear of India for this very reason - it's nearly impossible to know when a deal is "solid". There's very little recourse if a business or person reneges on a business deal, or rips you off.
I almost hope facebook wins this little battle; India benefits from facebook pumping a bunch of money into India's infrastructure to build it up, supplying internet to the poor, then India says "Nope, sorry facebook, you gotta go. It was nice having you!". Facebook would get what it deserves. I actually wouldn't be surprised if that happens.
I guess you have no idea what this is really about.
All we are asking our Govt. is to adopt same Net Neutrality standards that exist in US and other EU countries.
Companies like Uber/Amazon are already pumping huge money in India because they need us, not vice-versa. Just because we are open, unlike China, doesn't mean you can play unfair.
> All we are asking our Govt. is to adopt same Net Neutrality standards that exist in US and other EU countries.
I understand that, and support it 100%. I am 100% pro-net neutrality.
> Just because we are open, unlike China, doesn't mean you can play unfair.
My issue is that India will play unfair. They have a history of it.
Say what you will about all the people who have their own anecdotal bad experiences with Indian companies & professionals over the last 5-10 years (dozens of accounts that I've read here, on our very own hackernews), but the simple fact of the matter is that even India's government has a track record of reneging on deals. And these weren't small deals, these were deals years in the making.
That's not good for India. Investors will (and are) balking at the idea of entering the Indian market because who knows when India will pull the rug out from under them when the mood strikes. There's also very little legal recourse when that does happen. It doesn't help when your country is among the most corrupt countries on the planet; they ranked 94th in Transparency International's corruption index. There are 93 countries less corrupt than India. Source: http://www.transparency.org/cpi2013/results
Nicely done. Playing up stereotypes based on a couple of anecdotes. Do you have any solid evidence about this? Are you accusing a mass of 1.3 billion people, 1/5th of humanity, and their representative agents and agencies of being, what, dishonorable?
> laying up stereotypes based on a couple of anecdotes
I linked actual, HUGE trade deals that were important, worth billions, and between 2 nations. You linked me to empty search results.
Find me a single example of Russia or China reneging on deals with the WTO or with massive trade agreements between the U.S. There is a huge, massive difference.
India has been around for two orders of magnitude longer than facebook and is doing quite well without facebook and hopefully will gladly continue to do so.
It's quite the reverse situation here: Facebook leaves India, India continue unfazed. India gets rid of facebook, the overvalued facebook shares will plummet because facebook future depends on its success in conquering new users.
Indian here. The manipulation has been incredibly blatant and scummy. It's not even funny anymore. Friends who categorically denied having sent a mail to the Indian telecom regulatory authority on Facebook's behalf (conveniently supplied by Facebook) show up on my feed as having signed the mail.
It's an all-out blitzkrieg. I've seen full page ads in newspapers, banners at bus stops, even ads on local Indian websites.
It's one of the scummiest things I've seen from a major company.
Here's a screenshot of what's the permanent top-notification if you're an Indian and on Facebook- http://imgur.com/uykRY8G
WTF. "Free basic" .. It's two way communication. It's not like fucking 1994 where free TV involved four neighbours going on a satellite dish so you could get 6 channels.
Free Basic....get only the limited things we want you to have and the companies who are willing to pay for it. Fuck. That. Shit.
Want to do something that will actually help people; what about Free 1GB. Ensure every person gets 1GB of mobile data a month. Then they can go anywhere...use healthcare, government, facebook or....porn. or whatever the fuck they want. I agree, Free Basic is total bullshit.
5 replies →
I agree Facebook is doing this for their own greedy reasons, but they make one very good point:
"Banning free basics on the basis of net neutrality [...] means 1 billion people cant afford to access any services."
It isn't a choice between having facebook, or having the full internet.
Its a choice between having facebook, or having no internet at all.
Surely no internet at all, is the worst option.
Nobody else is going to give full internet to them for free. They will be stuck with nothing.
66 replies →
This seems to be a upping the ante from Facebook, as a response to the earlier petitions against internet.org and zero-rated apps.
I feel so angry at their persistence in this case. My feeling at this time is for the SaveTheInternet petitioners to also up the ante in return, by starting a movement to get people off Facebook.
As such it was lucky that WhatsApp founders did not have the bxxls to wait another year, when they could have acquired FB instead. All my school friends use WhatsApp more over here. And recently I am seeing increasing no. of people sign up on Telegram. (WhatsApp groups suck, that's another story, but kind of suggest that social networks are far from done. FB is perhaps the version 0.1 in social network maturity)
We should convey a clear message to Facebook, play fair or pack up. Early. I am glad I did not login to that stupid thing for over 3 months now.
PS: I have signed this petition as well as at least one earlier. I request other people based in India to do the same.
edit: minor
2 replies →
Wait...
"internet services like ... farming"?
This is just gross.
It doesn't sound any different than what Facebook does regularly. "X likes Y, do you want to like it?", ask X in person, they never liked Y.
Facebook, despite the fact I use it, is a slimy ad platform that creates stories at the expense of those that use it. I mean they "market their customer usage".
I've yet to see an explanation for the fictitious likes.
pg often defends Zuckerberg, it would be interesting to see his take on the this particular matter.
I'd prefer to hear the unadulterated version as well. It seems like most publications are ran through various filters and handlers before it makes it out to his website.
heck they have even started Youtube adverts now! http://imgur.com/FqrQQm4 How can we face such a force who has every means of media communication to dupe people?
From my Indian friends on Facebook, it appears Facebook is showing messages that certain friends of yours are supporting, or signed up for Facebook basics, even if they never did anything of the sort.
It's creepy, and messed up.
Edit: (Leaving the original post untouched), it appears Facebook will show you as having supported Free Basics if you clicked polls which seemed completely unrelated (as the original article points out, polls about "Connected India" for example. Still quite a distance from having supported Free basics, which is what Facebook appears to show.
Ah yes, the new propaganda of the 21st century: the corporations try to convince you that all your friends are supporting their proposals, and so, you should too. It works. The single most important thing for most humans is being accepted by their confederates.
Pay close attention: the corporations have no scruples about manipulating you to get their way, and Facebook is no exception.
A conciliatory response to this deception from Zuck himself is warranted; this kind of lie-distribution (to over a billion people) shouldn't be accepted quietly. Furthermore, if Zuck wants his philanthropy efforts to succeed, lying to a billion people to support his company is going to torpedo it.
> convince you that all your friends are supporting their proposals
This is a serious problem, because China already showed us the end game of this tactic with Sesame Credit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHcTKWiZ8sI
Might be the last straw for me, time to shut down the old facebook account.
My friends kind of know me as a supporter of net neutrality and I was horrified when two of them shared with me their notification screenshots which was showing me as supporting Facebook "Free Basics".
Please post those screenshots with your denial as widely as possible to expose how scammy all this is.
3 replies →
Would you mind linking to a copy of the screenshot here? (with your name etc. blacked out -- I just want to see what the notification looks like)
Even if this is entirely well-intentioned, which is certainly up for debate, it sets a precedent that will eventually see the world's most powerful media corporations become gatekeepers of the internet.
The web has been so successful because of any one of us can fire up a text editor and create the next phenomenon without spending a single dollar or seeking anyone's permission.
This is not charity, it is a coup d'état.
Let us not judge from Intellectual Ivory towers, the facts on the ground are 80% of Indians do not have internet access. You sometimes have to try "impure" methods. The question is still up in the air, whether FB Basics is gateway to full internet or if it is a walled garden. Either way, it is better than No Access. The immediate retort I get is, why not facebook provide free internet access to poor. Guys, is it their responsibility to give internet connection without any thing in return? How about asking that to your IAS uncle? or Politician neighbor.
The Net Neutrality activists of India, are bunch of middle class disconnected from poor activists. They think their idealogical purity is paramount than a dirty limited connection for the poor.
I am afraid populism will one more time win the day, while NN activists take a victory lap, the India's poor now will not have any form of connectivity.
> Let us not judge from Intellectual Ivory towers,
Labeling someone who disagrees with you as being in an "ivory tower" is basically an ad-hominem. Argue the merits, not the source.
> the facts on the ground are 80% of Indians do not have internet access. You sometimes have to try "impure" methods. The question is still up in the air, whether FB Basics is gateway to full internet or if it is a walled garden. Either way, it is better than No Access.
What if a pharma company came and said, "you know, this medicine causes birth defects, but it's OK to push it on Indians because 80% lack decent medication"... would you be for it?
India is making tremendous progress in bringing connectivity to the people. I grew up in an India where telephones were so scarce, that the waiting list for a landline phone was more than 10 years. People in villages had absolutely no access to phones at all; reaching a phone meant taking a bus/train to the nearest big town, and going to a PCO.
And yet today, almost everyone has a cellphone.
By pushing this "walled garden" to the people, FB will capture the market and derail the train of progress. FB has the ability to pay local carriers; but does HN?
27 replies →
> Either way, it is better than No Access.
I see this as a false dilemma. Internet access in India is already cheap enough to be near the cost of a phone over its effective lifetime. To quote the linked post:
> Given that data packages cost as little as Rs. 20 a month while phones cost Rs. 2,000 and up, we think their thesis itself is flawed
So the group that free basics can help to get online are those for whom the cost of a phone is feasible but paying the cost of a phone ×2 or ×3 for internet access is not. This is a relatively narrow fraction of the population.
Activists in India see that there are other reasonable alternatives to connect the entire population of the country that do not encourage the digital enslavement of their poor. The simplest one is a marginal improvement of per capita income that is driven by the people of the country itself, not exploitative "charity" from a foreign company. In very short order this, and the decreasing cost of technology will allow the whole net to reach everyone who could benefit today from free basics.
The false dilemma "better this than nothing" comes from a distant ivory tower that does not respect the capacity and future of the people of these developing nations. There are other ways to full access that do not sacrifice human rights.
4 replies →
This is an extremely short-sighted view. There is no question that connectivity is a vital resource necessary for equality and that we want everyone to have access to the internet. The question is how we expand the network to them and — most importantly — who pays for it?
A network paid for by foreign business interests and advertisers is fundamentally different than a network paid for by its users. But even though the foundation is different, they are in many ways substitute goods, meaning the presence of one will inhibit the popularity of the other. By the most basic economic reasoning, Free Basics will hurt the spread of user-funded peer-to-peer networks like the internet, just as distributing free clothing will hurt a local textile industry.
Based on that model, we can also predict the more fundamental difference between the two networks to be in the details w.r.t. privacy interests, not limited access.
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/internet/aircel-to-...
There are better ways of giving out Internet for free. By giving out slower internet. Or internet with a free data cap. Or a way of "earning" Internet data after watching some ads (see: Grameenphone in Bangladesh). I'd somewhat agree with the "Some Internet is better than No internet" argument, except that there are better ways of doing the "some Internet" which Facebook isn't doing.
> why not facebook provide free internet access to poor.
Facebook isn't even paying for the data in Free Basics. The telecom operators are (I assume their business plan is to get more people hooked onto the Internet so eventually more customers for them. A valid plan.). They can use the same business plan (in a net neutral way) for the slower internet or internet with a data cap options; and I believe that's what Aircel is doing.
(Aside: When you look at it this way it becomes even more obvious how devious Facebook is here -- without putting in money of their own to finance the actual data, they, a third party, jumped in and convinced telecom operators to enact a scheme which Facebook has a lot of control over despite not being the primary financers of the scheme. They get lots of credit and lots of control, without actually doing anything. When framed this way the parallels with the Brits' takeover of India seem a lot more real.)
And really, the "no access" part of your argument isn't really well founded either. For most, data plan costs aren't the barrier to internet access (in fact, a smartphone capable of working with the modern internet[1] is more expensive than a few years' worth of basic data).
[1]: Fun fact: Facebook's mobile app evolves pretty fast and becomes unusable on older phones either due to browser compatibility, OS compatibility, or speed issues. Same with many other sites and apps.
2 replies →
The problem is once you've tried this "impure" method there is no turning back. Once an ISP finds out they can offer some apps free but make other apps count towards data usage, the whole nature of the internet changes. Note that zero-rating is just one aspect of what mobile networks want to do; before the explosive activism in March, they were being more flagrant and trying to charge extra for each WhatsApp message or add extra charges for Skype calls.
17 replies →
> the facts on the ground are 80% of Indians do not have internet access
The facts on the ground for everywhere in the world not too long ago was worse than 20% access to the Internet. And I bet the current 20% Indian Internet users have much much faster connections than dial-up.
Things change. Fast. It is disingenuous to ignore the natural connectivity growth trajectory and focus on today's number only. Most will get connected to the Internet, with or without Facebook's "help" soon. The danger is with Facebook's "help", they'll get connected to FBNet (Free Basics Network, aka ZuckNet), diverting them away from connecting to the real Internet.
3 replies →
The question is still up in the air, whether FB Basics is gateway to full internet or if it is a walled garden.
I think it's a gateway to popularising tunneling; as long as FB lets those using FB Basics and those accessing FB from the full Internet communicate, you can still send information through. It's just like using FB as a proxy. Given that and what I know about Indian ingenuity, I predict a lot more hacks like this will appear:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9203946
So I suppose in some respects you could think of FB Basics as a very heavily throttled full Internet connection. You could even argue that FB and all the other companies giving "free" non-net-neutral access is driving incentive to hack around these restrictions, which I think is not at all a bad thing.
1 reply →
Facebook is not doing this for altruistic reasons.
9 replies →
> The Net Neutrality activists of India, are bunch of middle class disconnected from poor activists
Is that what you want to believe or can you back it up ? I think your statement couldn't be further from the truth.
New people connect to the Internet every day. This billion (really?) people might very well all be connected to the real Internet in ten years. Maybe this Facebook push can get them connected to FacebookNet in five years. Is that a good thing? Probably not, if history is any guide.
I agree strongly with this - its the same flawed logic when it comes to "idealistic democracy in the middle east".
Once the poor have some access to social media - it will automatically generate demand for more and better services.
1 reply →
On the ethics of this,
I'd like to know of the engineers/team in the chain of command who is responsible for the "Something went wrong" flag set on savetheinternet.in : http://i.imgur.com/K3JUack.png
Clearly this flag was not set on the grounds of pornography/violent matter/malicious link. This flag was instead set on a what is political speech, representing activists from a large swath of a democratic nation.
Consider how big of an attack this is on speech. Consider if a prominent website of any other political thought were thus flagged, and warned users away from.
To any folks from facebook reading this: please point out the team/engineers and the whole chain of command responsible for this flag -- this suppression is not a tiny thing.
The original article link to http://www.SaveTheInternet.in is actually to http://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.SaveTheIntern...
That looks like a link where facebook has replaced the link to the website with their own URL for tracking purposes. As a consequence they have to prevent open redirect attacks - https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Open_redirect .
Yes the same system can be used for censorship - but facebook can do that anyway because you're sharing links through a platform they have total control over.
The irony (of using a facebook tracking url to promote an anti-facebook site) is beautiful.
Hey, that's my screenshot. I can't edit my comment below any more but I think this is misleading – other links to savetheinternet.in work fine from facebook (try it yourself). There are a lot of other scammy things going on that are more important than this small technical issue, I'd delete my comment if I could.
they were even suppressing a popular Indian youtube comedy channel's take on this issue when it was released. And yes, fb does internally censor things which they dont like, for eg they were actively blocking tsu.co, a rival social network url in their platform until it hit the media and they had to backtrack
Coming from a rural farming community in India i think this is a very bad deal. I speak with my folks when i visit India about how they use technology. The use cases are very practical such as turning off/on the pumpset, since the fields are far and the power comes and goes at different times, this kind of app is amazing. I can think of similar use cases once IoT takes off. ex: Checking the water levels in paddy fields (The crabs make holes and if you are out of luck all the water is gone, resulting in midnight trips to fields to make sure everything is fine). The startups which might provide these kind of services will do well only if the internet is free, else FB will build its own apps to do this. FB will have a monopoly over the future use cases. The last thing my folks back home need is to play farmville or poke at each other or put booty shots in instagram :)
It seems kind of a mixed deal for that stuff. Apparently you can submit your app to use free basics and stuff like you mention should qualify. On the other hand it's easier to put a service on the regular web than to have to apply to Facebook. Actually hacking free basics might be good for things like checking the water levels - you could get a cheap phone pointed at the tank with an app to look at the water, use Facebook's data and enjoy the knowledge that that phone isn't going to be pokeing or candy-crushing.
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/internet-org/participat...
I am weary of the gatekeepers, they can change the rules when they want. What would really help from a long term perspective is to provide very low cost data plans, this might not happen if we go the free basics route since telcos have vested interest in keeping the free basics forever by jacking up the cost of data plans.
I don’t have much to add after the last couple threads on this (my concerns boil down to the importance of net neutrality, and the obscuring way free Facebook plus a few dozen apps is presented as philanthropy) but it’s interesting that after 36 countries, as they say, “embraced” internet.org, India may finally be where Mark Zuckerberg’s ambitions run aground.
We have a specific mix of an established tech ecosystem, educated middle class, and active (though imperfect) democracy, all of which combined to spark a grassroots movement for net neutrality. I hope we can resist Facebook’s lobbying, whether visible marketing like this or backroom deals with telecom networks and governments.
P.S. Not to mention the aspect I’ve seen many people bring up: a Western corporation trying to aggressively meddle in India has an unhappy precedent.
>a Western corporation trying to aggressively meddle in India has an unhappy precedent.
Are you referring to the East India Company as the linked article does? Please be clear, I am not familiar enough with Indian history, and I've seen no-one else bring it up on this page.
> the East India Company
Companies. There were several - British, Swedish French, Dutch, Portuguese, you name it.
The British ended up taking the rest over, but practically every European colonial power had their own East India Company at one point or another (or tried to) and they all competed on how best to exploit the resources they could extract from India.
Yeah, I see people reference colonialism in general as well as the EIC in particular.
1 reply →
If I understand this right, it means poor people don't actually get the Internet. They get Facebook. Ergo it's a regression back to pre-Internet "Prodigy" and "Compuserve" and "AOL" only days, for poor people. And then they get piles of ads in their face. It's not really the Internet. So is that better than nothing? I think that's up to the users to decide rather than people who have the real Internet.
But I also think it's misleading to refer to this as "digital equality" or that Facebook and friends constitutes "essential internet services." The only essential Internet service is the fucking connection to the unabridged Internet. So call it what it actually is. Don't exaggerate (lie).
EDIT: I don't use Facebook, at all. I have tons of friends who don't use it, at all. So how "essential" is it? I'm completely OK with them giving free Facebook + only whatever else they want, but it's b.s. to call this essential or basic. It's not even really free if people are getting ad bombed to pay for it.. So yeah, let people have whatever this is, it's fine, but don't lie/mislead about what it is.
http://www.savetheinternet.in - A template for contacting the authorities to show support for net neutrality (speak up against "Free Basics").
Last time, they received over a million e-mails [0], and that did have a positive effect. Let's 10x that.
[0] http://bit.ly/1YCxhlv
Facebook is doing its best to stop people from accessing this as well -- if I click a link to that website from Facebook, I get a message that seems designed to stop me from going ahead. It says, "Something Went Wrong. Sorry, there was a problem with this link: http://www.SaveTheInternet.in/ You can now continue to this website, or go back to the page you were on before. Remember, only follow links from sources you trust."
A pseudo-live count of e-mails sent to TRAI in support of #NetNeutrality
https://twitter.com/bulletinbabu
This evokes memories of colonialism. Most Indians I know are like "gtfo we don't need your help" and Zuckerberg is going like "well I'm going to help you whether you like it or not."
It is SO obvious he's doing it to make sure Facebook has a permanent hold on the huge and growing Indian market. But to disguise it as a charity, that's scummy as anything I've seen a major company do.
First let's keep affordability aside and think about this.
Internet is built on principles of neutrality. It is built on public property (airways, land) that government leases to companies on our behalf. Internet is what it is today because of this neutrality principle. It has given rise to so many companies out of nothingness and created so much opportunity for disruption and growth. So any
We do not want to turn Internet into something useless and backwards (like cable/tv networks). That is what Facebook is trying to do here by lobbying the government to change policy. This has to be stopped no question.
Now let's talk about affordability. Government should look into programs that will lower the overall cost of Internet by reforming how they license spectrum.
They can also provide free access to Internet in public places - like public schools, public libraries, train/bus stations, agri markets etc where most information hungry people who cannot afford are already there. They can also encourage large city/town center operators to provide free wifi.
All said, most poor people in India who don't have Internet are in tier-2/3 cities and villages where there is no connectivity at all today. So, it is not a question of affordability but connectivity.
Facebook is being irresponsible and evil in this case and exploiting the situation and not doing anything to help. In contrast, google recently launched a program to provide high-speed Internet free wifi in 400 train stations in India. This is the largest public wifi program in the world.
Move fast and break things vs. Don't be evil
Why not let "our less fortunate brothers" decided what they want. If they don't want free internet, then its their choice. How insane is it to let the TRAI regulate the internet! Do you not see the internet is the only real means of liberating people? And you want a group of elite people to control this! What happens to the "these airwaves belong to us" argument when the government bans anti-govt web sites or porn websites or any other websites that the current elite don't agree with? Down with intelligentsia!
'Why not let the customer choose' can also be a generic argument against almost any kind of regulation. Why not have less strict regulations for food safety, or airlines, so various competitors can offer differing levels of safety - and if it matters enpugh to people, they'll choose the (more expensive) options with more safety. Is that freedom or is it capitalist anarchy?
I would argue (as many do) that government regulations have a place in enforcing basic guarantees of safety and fairness. And net neutrality strikes me as very important to guarantee fairness, both in terms of freedom of speech and a level playing field for innovation.
"Why not let [the customer] choose" is an argument that can be made of any net neutrality debate.
Should there be fast-lanes in the US?
TWC: We'll offer plans with and without fast-lanes and let the customers choose!
Either the internet is the internet or it's not. Facebook wants to bring Facebook to rural villages? Fine, but they have to bring the whole internet with them.
"Should there be fast-lanes in the US?"
Yes. Why not? Just like should there be expensive doctors, restaurants, entertainment, etc.? Obviously yes.
"Either the internet is the internet or it's not. Facebook wants to bring Facebook to rural villages? Fine, but they have to bring the whole internet with them."
My point is let the people in the rural villages decided wether they want Facebook internet or other forms of internet. Please don't decide on their behalf. It is very patronizing and antithetical to progess.
2 replies →
> Should there be fast-lanes in the US?
You mean like a company paying an ISP to place a server rack there and then reselling that server space branded as a Content Delivery Network to media companies who want their end consumers to have smoother experience (while the non-paying competition is stuck with "loading..." indicators)?
Nah, will never happen.
Indian here, they even started Television ads showing zuke. It is getting out of hand. There VP of Internet org will be doing an AMA on reddit today !!
finally more people are speaking about it. its sad to see facebook revert to cheap publicity stunt tactics to get their way around. I always had a good impression of FB specially for their open source tools which I use a lot, and I really hope they can put this murky event behind them and go back to the way they were.
n.b : link to the full page ads : http://imgur.com/a/hb3nt
Really? My first encounter with facebook was when I got spammed by a guy I barely knew, along with the rest of his email address book. I've always found the company to be slimy.
The company might be super slimy, but their engineering team has made huge improvements to the modern web / app development and had gifted us with the awesome open source tools. Only because of them I had a positive outlook of the company
3 replies →
Today I learned that Indians have a word for ten million (crore).
On a more serious note this facebook campaign is an embodiment of principles elucidated Zero to One. Competition sucks, argues Mr. Thiel, try to create a monopoly. And monopoly is great if you are a business but for customers it is other way round. I hope India will preserve open and competitive internet for its citizens.
The article states that the chief aim of this campaign is to prevent Indians from using google. Are there any signs of them taking countermeasures?
In "Zero to One", (which I just finished reading yesterday), Thiel actually argued that monopolies were good for both sides of the market, so long as the monopoly was achieved through excellence, and not just corruption or government-grant.
Facebook needs to stop a homegrown Facebook alternative arising in India.
They need to stop it now, by smothering it in the crib, redirecting its potential future users into a Facebook-curated walled-garden.
Growth is required for Facebook, and India is a clear growth area, China having been largely ruled off-limits by the Chinese government.
A toehold in one of the most populous countries on the planet. Has to have the Facebook board salivating.
The dissonance between Mark Zuckerberg's letter to his daughter and stuff like this is hard to bridge.
Okay, if an activist can contemplate a program giving everyone in India who wants it 500MB a month mobile bandwidth, then I have to call out western web app developers for committing a heinous crimes against global Internet access equality.
It used to be that I could get by with a 500MB plan on my iPhone, and so long as I avoided video streaming, I'd usually use 300MB. Now I see that my Maps apps alone use that in a month, and I run out of 6GB bandwidth every month.
It's a truism that bandwidth is like highway lanes: If it's there, it will be used. But really, am I getting more functionality for the increased bandwidth? I think not.
You're blaming devs because you us 6gb a month? That is a joke. I share 15gb with 6 people in my family and we've never gone over. Obviously you are doing something out of the ordinary.
The devs must have done something, because I haven't changed how I use Maps. How is it that Maps alone is using the entire allocation of the bandwidth I used to use in a month?
1 reply →
Interestingly, Wikimedia also engages in zero-rating, through their Wikipedia Zero program. But their motivations are genuinely altruistic. (After all, it brings them no direct benefit and costs them money.)
Wikipedia is a pretty shady organization. For years they have used server costs as one of the main reasons (and in the some cases the main reason) why people should donate. But their finance reports paint a very different picture. Their server costs reflect a very small percentage of their overall costs. They ask for way more money than they actually need. More money is spent on "investments" and fundraisers than is spent on the cost of maintaining the site. Some people have also alleged purposeful backlinking to their for profit sites. That is, adding and replacing links in wikipedia pages to point to websites that the wikipedia founders profit from. So using wikipedia as an example of "genuinely altruistic" motivation is a stretch. The founders of wikipedia do not benefit directly from their work, but they certainly benefit indirectly and through false advertising.
> Wikipedia is a pretty shady organization.
Wikimedia. They do a lot more than just the encyclopædia.
> For years they have used server costs as one of the main reasons (and in the some cases the main reason) why people should donate. But their finance reports paint a very different picture. Their server costs reflect a very small percentage of their overall costs.
Server costs are not the only thing they need to spend money on. Consider their budget for 2015-2016:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_...
40% of that is spent on engineering. Someone needs to maintain MediaWiki.
~6% is spent on legal - they're a large site that has to deal with copyright issues, they need lawyers. ~15% is spent on administrative costs, as if you employ lots of people, you need to manage them.
> They ask for way more money than they actually need.
They could run on a leaner budget, yes, but it's not as if the other money they get is wasted. More money means they can hire more engineers to work on the site and improve it, for example.
> More money is spent on "investments" and fundraisers than is spent on the cost of maintaining the site.
Looking at that budget, they spend more on Engineering than on Community Engagement, Grants, Advancement, and Communications combined.
> Some people have also alleged purposeful backlinking to their for profit sites. That is, adding and replacing links in wikipedia pages to point to websites that the wikipedia founders profit from.
Could you provide evidence, or at least a credible source?
2 replies →
This is deception. Pure and simple. There are many different and ethical ways of providing connectivity to the poor but not at the cost of losing net neutrality.
I'm still mad that facebook hasn't unblocked the I Fucking Love Science page yet here in India. Why would anyone block a page about science while letting the religious bullshit/reposts runs rampant?
This album shows the kind of things Facebook is doing to push Free Basics.
http://m.imgur.com/gallery/dnAFg
The real question is, will facebook lobby against, and attempt to disallow, free community / coop network access ?
It's one thing to trick a bunch of poor people into thinking you're giving them free Internet access ... it's still free.
It's quite another to then shackle them by manipulating their legal system into disallowing any other free options.
I have a lot on my plate right now, but it sure would be interesting to do a very small scale proof of concept free wifi mesh anywhere in India ... just to see who that pisses off ... I see my favorite bulk IP provider (he.net) has zero presence in India, so that doesn't make things quick and simple ... we'll see ...
Hundreds of millions of people in India don't even have access to electricity, let alone internet. The Indian government is extremely corrupt and over-regulating. They have failed to bring modernity to a billion people. That's the context here. From what I can tell, Free Basics is a market solution that will allow a bunch of self-interested parties to bring connectivity to people who would probably never get it otherwise.
If there are all of these other alternatives, why doesn't someone set them up as a competitor to Free Basics. No one would use a limited service like Free Basics if they had free access to "real" internet access.
What makes you think Free Basics is doing anything about electricity or connectivity? It is just zero-rating for Facebook & partner apps, riding on top of infrastructure and services built by existing telecom networks in the country with the "extremely corrupt" and "failed" government.
2 replies →
With neither Linkedin nor Facebook accounts, I can't read this article. But maybe this one is just as useful: http://www.hindustantimes.com/tech/facebook-campaign-gets-mo...
I think this could all be resolved by letting Facebook pay the cost, but if they're going to restrict where you can go, require that they are restricting it to a competitor. Twitter maybe? lesswrong? And first level outgoing links from those sources.
While I'm curious about the pros and cons of a gratis walled garden, was the greater offense the way Facebook used their presence to affect political change? Would it have been offensive to do so in an attempt to counteract pollution?
Yes. If it was an extremely self interested cleanup of only a certain kind of pollution which it would only help with on the condition that other more important kinds of pollution increased or got much less attention, and would lead to much worse long term consequences, and facebook was completelly scummy spamming everyone about "if you don't want this, you want babies to die of pollution."
Free Facebook means free Facebook Messenger.
Give a billion people free Facebook Messenger and I'm sure someone will develop an IoFM 'Internet over Facebook Messenger' protocol.
On another note, AOL was a walled-garden and look where that ended up.
This is impossible, Facebook Messenger doesn't have any open protocol at all. Facebook will fight everyone who will try to do so.
Impossible? HTML is plain text.
> for every new user that comes on the internet, Facebook makes Rs. 8, while Google makes aroumd Rs. 48
Where are these figures from? Who pays facebook for signups? Just looking for an insight into this.
He's probably just dividing their revenue (or some other financial metric) by the number of users.
Fine. Thanks.
At the end of the story a few people in Silicon Valley will get disproportionately richer than everyone else.
If there are alternative ways to bring internet access to the billion unconnected Indians, then why does the Indian government need to ban Free Basics? Those alternatives can be set up in parallel. No one will use Free Basics if the alternative is free "real" internet access.
For those of us without a linkedin/facebook:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...
Over the next few years, someone should also look into how much of that "philanthropy" money is going into Internet.org from Zuckerberg - mainly because I'd hate for him to get away with most people believing he's giving away his fortune for the good of mankind, when in fact he'd just be propping up Facebook, but with fewer taxes on his money.
there was no mention of philanthropy, it was PR stunt.
All Zuckerburg did was move his wealth to a private LLC, it's the degenerate media and press that interpreted it as "philanthropy", probably to get some Likes on their FB post.
Besides his entire letter saying it was being given to charity you mean?
1 reply →
His 'fortune' is primarily a claim on future FB revenue. It can be wiped out at any time.
The Indian poor people may be poor but they are not fools. A substandard service will not take off just like Tata Nano car for the poor failed miserably so will this Facebook initiative.
is internet really going to help the 600 million people that practice open defecation? if they can't figure out that digging a hole where to poop is clearly better, how will they make good use of the internet and not get themselves manipulated.
If I was facebook, I'd tread lightly.
India has a long history of reneging on deals. Once a deal is struck with most nations, that's it. Done deal. With India, they don't care - they'll do whatever is convenient for them.
They did just that on a huge WTO deal years in the making (source: http://www.npr.org/2014/08/10/339292735/why-indias-modi-defi...). The also reneged on a solar energy trade agreement with the U.S (source: http://www.upi.com/Business_News/Energy-Industry/2013/02/07/...).
Hell, even Russia and China won't back out of deals once struck. They'll piss and moan if it turns out they got the short end of the stick, but they'll still honor the deal.
I tell my clients to steer clear of India for this very reason - it's nearly impossible to know when a deal is "solid". There's very little recourse if a business or person reneges on a business deal, or rips you off.
I almost hope facebook wins this little battle; India benefits from facebook pumping a bunch of money into India's infrastructure to build it up, supplying internet to the poor, then India says "Nope, sorry facebook, you gotta go. It was nice having you!". Facebook would get what it deserves. I actually wouldn't be surprised if that happens.
I guess you have no idea what this is really about.
All we are asking our Govt. is to adopt same Net Neutrality standards that exist in US and other EU countries.
Companies like Uber/Amazon are already pumping huge money in India because they need us, not vice-versa. Just because we are open, unlike China, doesn't mean you can play unfair.
> All we are asking our Govt. is to adopt same Net Neutrality standards that exist in US and other EU countries.
I understand that, and support it 100%. I am 100% pro-net neutrality.
> Just because we are open, unlike China, doesn't mean you can play unfair.
My issue is that India will play unfair. They have a history of it.
Say what you will about all the people who have their own anecdotal bad experiences with Indian companies & professionals over the last 5-10 years (dozens of accounts that I've read here, on our very own hackernews), but the simple fact of the matter is that even India's government has a track record of reneging on deals. And these weren't small deals, these were deals years in the making.
That's not good for India. Investors will (and are) balking at the idea of entering the Indian market because who knows when India will pull the rug out from under them when the mood strikes. There's also very little legal recourse when that does happen. It doesn't help when your country is among the most corrupt countries on the planet; they ranked 94th in Transparency International's corruption index. There are 93 countries less corrupt than India. Source: http://www.transparency.org/cpi2013/results
3 replies →
Nicely done. Playing up stereotypes based on a couple of anecdotes. Do you have any solid evidence about this? Are you accusing a mass of 1.3 billion people, 1/5th of humanity, and their representative agents and agencies of being, what, dishonorable?
Let me google it for you,
"china renege on deal" https://www.google.com/search?q=china+reneges+on+deal&oq=chi...
"russia renege on deal" https://www.google.com/search?q=china+reneges+on+deal&oq=chi...
> laying up stereotypes based on a couple of anecdotes
I linked actual, HUGE trade deals that were important, worth billions, and between 2 nations. You linked me to empty search results.
Find me a single example of Russia or China reneging on deals with the WTO or with massive trade agreements between the U.S. There is a huge, massive difference.
India has been around for two orders of magnitude longer than facebook and is doing quite well without facebook and hopefully will gladly continue to do so.
It's quite the reverse situation here: Facebook leaves India, India continue unfazed. India gets rid of facebook, the overvalued facebook shares will plummet because facebook future depends on its success in conquering new users.
American-Indian(Sikh) guy here who actually has relatives there. India has not been doing well. Let Zuckerburg in and let him do some magic.