Comment by erbdex

you don't even have to go that far just offer free free 2g (without edge internet). It the slowest speed possible but sites like wikipedia will work well on them. It will help people to know important stuff without wasting time on facebook.

Nonsense. Facebook is rich enough and powerful enough to MAKE the choice be full-internet or nothing. They and other powerful entities can provide full internet. It is THEIR fault that the choice is FaceBook or nothing because they want that to be the choice. FaceBook is not some savior here. The ramifications of pushing everyone to FB are also devastating because they would force everyone to get locked in to using FB for everything and then the power imbalance will be extremely serious in the long-term. Even a delay in getting people online is better for the people's interests than locking them into a shitty closed system for the long-term.

You are incorrect in how you labeled your second "choice," it should be:

"Its a choice between having Facebook, or having no Facebook at all."

Do not let them confuse you into comparing the two... What you just said is why this sort of think makes my fucking blood boil (no anger at you friend, it's with the institution manipulating you).

What they are trying to do, and this really pisses me off, is rebrand "internet" to "Facebook," for poor Indians. A group who as of right now is unaware of the difference and less apt to understand the evils of the marketing engine behind it because they are not yet connected.

Tangent: they are making this so much worse by using government built spectrum. What the fuck kind of perverse asshole thought that would be okay?

... Back to the point.

Think about this, from an infrastructure standpoint: it will cost them more in firewalls and configuration to limit the Internet than to simply allow unfettered access.

I'm not even kidding, they are going to spend more money implementing basic access than by just giving out plain ol' Internet. Knowing that, I find it pretty fucking audacious Facebook thinks we are all so fucking stupid to accept that line of shit.

Okay... they know we won't but we don't matter to their growth target. They need mobile users, that aren't already users, that they can exploit for money (ad views, sponsored content) or their stock will tank because they aren't going to hit their growth target for Qn.

So where do they look? The world's poor. They go in and offer "internet," and market it to them as a "right" or some sort of moral high ground. Then back home they market their "humanitarian" efforts making for some touching PR moments.

/slow-clap "nice work, assholes."

And finally for how this is actually worse than "no Facebook at all," is because FB's marketing machine will go around saying to governments and media "don't worry about India's Internet, we fixed it." This, I promise, will slow the development, if not halt it, because other organizations non-profit or for-profit will think it's a done deal. Even scarier is that the people in those areas won't want "internet," because "Facebook is good enough."

Digital slavery is what this should be called. It should be abhorred. It should be vilified. It should not be tolerated. We should all be angry.

Edit: Updates for grammar and to let person I was replying to know I'm not at all upset at them or trying to direct anger their way.

One issue is that it won't be possible to have regulation that doesn't prevent Free Basics, but prevents other abuses of not having net neutrality.

Such as having lots of subsets of the internet being offered for free or cheap, and the real internet being gradually priced out of the range of most people(citing 'infrastructure costs" of course). This can't be prevented as long as there's a loophole for Free Basics in the net neutrality regulation.

> Its a choice between having facebook, or having no internet at all.

So.. a choice between having no internet with a chance to be part of the effort to destroy it and having no internet ?

It is critical to understand that there can be no internet without net neutrality, if you support in any way a choice that goes against net neutrality, you're taking part in destroying the internet.

Is the lack of Internet truly that bad? India, while woefully poor in many places, is perhaps the most spiritually rich nation I have ever known. For all the stresses of life and distortions of industrialization, let alone internetification, they have far more inner resolve than most of us in the pill-popping West. To say that they have nothing if they reject an inch-wide glimpse of the Internet, provided by a company which is the face of corporate survellience, no less, smacks of the arrogant notion that more is always better. The Buddha found satisfaction by rejecting the material life, after all.

the main problem is that you cant beat "free", Facebook will kill the incentive for deploying internet at rural areas, and some day they will only have facebook and will be tied to it...

Internet is not a panacea, or all good solution. Sometimes restricted internet, (especially when it's restricted by someone, who has no stake/skin-in-the-game for your growth) can do more harm than no internet. You're not recognizing the risk* of habit-forming facebook addiction to the poor.

* -- Perhaps you could try tracking your time and see how much of it you spend on facebook. I recommend rescuetime.com

Some access is better than no access but some types of "some access" are better than other types of "some access".

>Its a choice between having facebook, or having no internet at all. >Surely no internet at all, is the worst option.

But that's such a slippery slope to go on.

What prevents other companies to hop on the bandwagon to provide their own services for free?

And one day, lo and behold, we're on an Internet where the cost of entry to compete with the big blue (or any big gun) is almost insurmountable.

The point you are missing is that it's not about

> "having no internet at all"

because what Facebook is offering is anything but the Internet. It's not even close to being the Internet.

It is Facebook's walled garden which they control, they decide what lives there and what remains, what gets kicked out.

You know what is worse, it is not that Facebook is providing something that is not the Internet, but the worse is - it will give a precedence to such business practices that may effectively kill the Internet as a medium, as we know it today, in India and turn it into the cable company model commodity where we have to buy packs of "access X, Y, Z services at speed A", or even "access sites X, Y, K" when there is another pack "X, K, M services pack".

It will affect innovations, new services in a drastic manner. Can you imagine what the status of Facebook would have been if the Internet all over the world was in a way that provided Orkut for free because Google paid for it by including it in its "Google Free Basics" pack? I don't think Facebook would have been here at all.

Now, let's say Amazon arrived in India before Flipkart, Snapdeal (Indian e-commerce portals) and jumped on an "India Free Basics" plan and now people have free access to Amazon but this guy in Bangalore who started Flipkart couldn't afford to jump on that "India Free Basics" because hey, they didn't have deep pockets from the beginning. The list of what-if examples can be endless here, I just hope you get the idea.

> Nobody else is going to give full internet to them for free.

Indian Govt actually provides highly subsidised Internet in rural areas and is working to make it more accessible. And ideas like Facebook Free Basics are actually going to harm such initiative by the Govt giving them a reason that people already have "Free Basics". I mean not saying this is how it's gonna end up exactly but let Facebook and Network operators have their way right now and something similar is waiting for us in the future. Sounds like a mild dystopian story? Well, read about "license raj" in India and related stories.

> They will be stuck with nothing.

No, they won't. They will get the Internet, maybe few months, or a couple of years down the line - slowly (and this is already happening) which is better than not getting "the Internet" ever, or when it's too late.

By the way, what stops Facebook from kicking WikiPedia and Khan Academy out (let's just say they are there) later on and rather bring Snapchat, Vine and Instagram in its place? Now, you may say it's better to watch cat gifs and share selfies than having "no Internet at all", where again you'll be missing the point that "this is NOT the Internet" and that line of thinking is unfortunate in my humble opinion.

A lot of these points have been covered in these videos by a local standup comedy group (in order): https://youtu.be/mfY1NKrzqi0, https://youtu.be/W0w_YhZUYeA, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAQWsTFF0BM

I'm surprised Facebook is actually wanting this to happen. Being the poor man's internet seems to me like a sure way to kill a brand, quite a gamble!

Wrong. Having no internet at all is better than having some. When you talk about internet it usually means all of it.

Indian here. I feel so enraged that they're doing this right in our face!

The messaging is extremely misleading.

How do we up the ante against Facebook? This is just not done.