Comment by tim333
10 years ago
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
Minus: might become a barrier to entry to other services
Plus: provides "some" internet for a billion people ... including wikipedia and various info apps. Includes photo sharing, chat, ...
Which of these is more important ? That's the big question being discussed here. And of course the people discussing how this might stand in the way of their future profits feel absolutely no need to provide an alternative ...
>Plus: provides "some" internet for a billion people ... including wikipedia and various info apps. Includes photo sharing, chat, ...
Chat, fb, etc is free for now, because Facebook "allows" it to be free. Once everyone is on free basics, they can do a U-turn and say only Facebook messenger, Facebook website, Facebook * is free. What are you going to do then?
What prevents them from doing this?
Letting FB or any company be a gatekeeper to net is wrong on so many levels. There are so many devious things they can do and we as people or other companies will be totally helpless.
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Give them access to the full internet. Anything less is disengenuous. They're going to end up using Facebook anyway, unless someone ends up making the Indian VK. Can't let the possibility of innovation conflict with profit forecasts...
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