Comment by petke
10 years ago
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.
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.
Facebook is not a carrier.
If any carrier chooses to provide full Internet access for free, they may do so.
So far they haven't, though. Which is why company-sponsored basic service that's free to the users emerged in the first place.
Google has announced free Wi-Fi at 100 railway stations in India. I think it does something similar in other countries (and there is Google Fibre). It is just a start but more sensible than what facebook chose to do.
Now this is what I think. Facebook is interested in being a monopoly and this step will ensure its rivals don't get in (because facebook pays for it). This is what all the argument is about. Saying billion people will get free internet is just an eyewash. They don't give you full internet, just the part which serves their interest.
Carriers should not control/discrimintate internet access. This should apply to other companies as well.
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See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10791939
One carrier is already trying this.
Also, facebook isn't even financing the actual data (the carriers are), and the carriers' business plan (get people hooked onto the Internet so they migrate to a full plan) works on any form of "free limited internet" plan, where the plan is limited by speed or a data cap instead of by limiting what "Internet" means. Facebook is a third party which has wedged itself into this with extra deals; but the situation from the carriers' point of view shouldn't be much different if they set a free data cap or provide a free slow internet plan.
It's not true that no other carrier is offering free internet. It's a better model with no restrictions.
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/internet/aircel-to-...
If they truly had altruistic intentions, they damn well could be.
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What if I claim you are rich enough to donate to charities of not only your choice, but my choice as well. Will you donate to arbitrary charities that arbitrary people ask you to? Just because you have money does not mean we get to tell you what to do with it.
>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.
That's because you have the luxury of having Internet access and are not affected by lack of it. Why don't you let those without any access at all get some access and let them decide whether they want to be locked in or not? Or are you saying you know what they want better then they do?
> What if I claim you are rich enough to donate to charities of not only your choice, but my choice as well.
High inequality and mega-rich charity are a related issue. Rich people is not contributing with taxes as they should. If that were the case the states will have more resources to help where help is needed.
This was in the news some time ago: "Germany's super-rich have rejected an invitation by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett to join their 'Giving Pledge' to give away most of their fortune. The pledge has been criticized in Germany, with millionaires saying donations shouldn't replace duties that would be better carried out by the state."
I completely agree with that position. The state, voted by its citizens, should decide not the super-rich even when they have good intentions.
Unfortunately neither does any one if us know what the unconnected want. Let's not pretend we do.
So, given that, we're doing what we would've wanted to be done if we were in their position.
Locking me into a particular website (or a set of) , especially the one which misuses my personal information is not something i want to be locked into.
Hence, we shouldn't stand by silently letting them be locked into "Facebook and partners".
Facebook is so asking for it, this time.
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> decide whether they want to be locked in or not
is the same logic as, "let people sell themselves into slavery". Sure, who is X to stop someone from selling themselves into slavery, right? But it's also an extreme asshole response to a situation where a rich and powerful slaver goes to poor people and says, "my goal is to help you, when you choose to become my slave, I will clothe and feed you and even educate you, I'm doing this to help you" and someone criticizes that.
It doesn't matter if it's not MY business to stop FB or take away others' freedom to use FB. FB is still doing this to gain power, and the ramifications of this long-term are terrible. And your statement amounts to "FB has a right to lock people in (and to misrepresent their motives), and people have a right to choose to be locked in" which is a shitty pathetic reply to my criticism.
I think your argument makes no sense. I am all for helping people etc, but just because Facebook is rich by your definition, the poor people are not entitled to its money. FB will do what is needed to promote its self interest and in that process some (supposedly poor) people get some amount of free internet, its not such an evil thing, though, if it turns to be an evil thing in the long run, it could be regulated in the future. I see arguments about net neutraility though, but I dont understand/see the solution, if FB cancels this, there is no free wikipedia to the masses (which is horrible).
The argument you're imagining makes no sense, but it isn't my argument. My argument isn't that FB has an obligation in our system to provide free internet to people nor is it that rejecting FB here is in every possible respect better. My argument is that FB is lying when they present their motives as being about the interests of the poor citizens.
I think you are not hearing the point. Given that Facebook is a greedy company (and not a charity), its not going to give away free full internet. So our choice is about allowing, or not allowing, a billion poor people free Facebook access.
Its easy for us to say this is no good and it should be stopped because Facebook access is not as good as the full internet. But who are we to deny poor people what little they can get?
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 that will actually help poor people.
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It won't be a billion poor people getting free Facebook access.
Indians who can afford smartphones and electricity, but not a basic data plan (how many?), will be getting Facebook access at the price of being subjected to advertising, tracking, etc.
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This is not about the poor (although Facebook would have you believe so). It is about who controls data. I am saying this as someone who has lived in a village before. If a walled garden is given free entry, people will never get out of it, and I am stating this from experience. A lot of companies (including startups) will never be able to ever reach 1 billion people. Imagine an Apple Store, but for the whole of internet. That is what this will end with.
> It is THEIR fault that the choice is FaceBook or nothing because they want that to be the choice.
It's Facebook's fault that many Indians can't afford the Internet? Okay...it's also Facebook's fault that there is poverty in the world. You know, poverty that spontaneously started to exist in 2004, when Facebook was founded.
Nobody's blaming them for creating poverty, but taking advantage of it to lock people in to their system is another matter.
Where did the OP imply any of that?
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.
>> Tangent: they are making this so much worse by using government built spectrum.
About that tangent: what makes you think of restrictec spectrum as "government-built"? It's spectrum.
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.
Ya, who needs to know the price of rice or fertilizer? Certainly not Indian farmers; they can eat inner peace. And who needs to learn algebra? Certainly not rural children; they already know the meaning of life.
Free Basics isn't the answer, but going from no-internet to just-a-tiny-bit-of-internet can have a big impact on someones life.
> Certainly not rural children
Funnily enough, having worked for a while on projects in rural Maharashtra, the children are the path to information for those villages - they're the ones who can read and write and know the prices and share information upwards to the adults.
(the conclusion being, back then, that one should market to children...)
It may be spiritual but it's also pretty fucked up in many ways not unrelated to the spirituality like bride burning, killing people who marry into the wrong cast, leading the world in modern slavery (14 million in the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_slavery) and in malutrition (nearly double that of Sub Saharan Africa, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malnutrition_in_India). I think banning those people from a free if a bit crappy internet service because the well off are offended by the idea of it being provided by Facebook is dubious.
Get one thing straight. Free Basics is not about "bringing up" the poor. And among the "well off" are those who were poor once and have used knowledge from the internet to be wise enough to realize what is going on. Free Basics, if allowed to remain, will become a gatekeeper to the internet and will essentially become a barrier to entry to other services
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What do pills have to do with this?
The Internet is a global communications network. It allows you to connect with anyone anywhere on the planet and nearby space. Without access youbare severely limited in what you can learn and do.
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".
"some access" is demonstrably harmful if it leads to the ultimate curtailment of availability of "full access".
Demonstrably? Curious, has this ever happened in a relatively free market without a full-access competitor showing up?
>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.