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Seeing Beyond The Hubris Of Facebook's Free Basics Fiasco (techcrunch.com)
Facebook's Free Basics was an ill-conceived effort to bring Internet access to the poor in India. It created a walled garden in which Facebook and the Indian telecom providers selected which websites people could visit. The users of Free Basics would find that Facebook was the center of their virtual universe and would experience only what it allowed them to.
The Free Basics project originated from an idea that Zuckerberg had about connecting the next 5 billion people. He documented this in a paper titled Is Connectivity A Human Right? He wrote that in the U.S. "an iPhone with a typical two-year data plan costs about $2,000, where about $500-600 of that is the phone and $1,500 is the data." What Zuckerberg and his U.S. team didn't understand was that in India you can buy computer tablets and smartphones for as little as $50, and that 100MB of data -- which is more than a Free Basics user will consume in a month -- costs much less than a dollar. So the entire basis of the paper was flawed.
The Free Basics project originated from an idea that Zuckerberg had about connecting the next 5 billion people. He documented this in a paper titled Is Connectivity A Human Right? He wrote that in the U.S. "an iPhone with a typical two-year data plan costs about $2,000, where about $500-600 of that is the phone and $1,500 is the data." What Zuckerberg and his U.S. team didn't understand was that in India you can buy computer tablets and smartphones for as little as $50, and that 100MB of data -- which is more than a Free Basics user will consume in a month -- costs much less than a dollar. So the entire basis of the paper was flawed.
Combined with their hubris, impossible.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
How is a captive portal site different from AOL?
How, in any way, is a captive portal service in India, any different than America On Line or Compuserve was as captive portals in the U.S.?
They allowed the "Me Too!"'s onto the Internet in the first place, which later expanded to general access.
How dare you insult gardens like that!!!
Why is Zuckerberg taken seriously? :-)
I mean, his hack was in the right place and right time to let the proles create their own http presence.
Why is he given credence? (Cf. Bill Gates
...was to think that the Indian government would stand idly by while Facebook tried to create for itself a monopoly on information and internet services.
Tim Berners-Lee summed it up when he recently said "All of the internet. For all of the people. For all of the time." and “We should be able to use the Web without worrying about being spied on and without finding that you can’t get to places because the ISP you use has got a deal with somebody else."
It's different, because Zuck wrote a paper about it which he invented all on his own. He probably wasn't born when Compuserve was created so obviously it couldn't possibly be anything like it.
All newspapers present a carefully chosen viewpoint and flog it incessantly. In fact, they are constantly trying to shut down the internet so people will get all their information (and advertising) from newspapers.
...Zuckerberg is no different.
/millionaire/billionaire: When you have enough, you want more - regardless. His logic is exactly the same as every commercial software company in the world - if someone pirates your software, you have stolen property from the software company. And the pirates logic is exactly the opposite: We haven't stolen anything, it's not a physical item stolen, and besides - there's no guarantee anyone would purchase it anyway. Both sides are right so some extent, yes - potentially lost revenue (not guaranteed), but also potential advertisement (popularity increase = fame & more customers actually wanting the product).
I have nothing against capitalism, but what is almost boring is the predictability of every young successful
The entire point is: If we let people get away with endless greed, we're the ones to blame because we just stand by and Zuck it up (pun intended).
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Those 100MB of data are valid for 3 days. Please don't write garbage comparing a monthly plan to one that expires in 3 days just to suit your "it costs less than $1" triad. You can make the point just as well by talking about the plans which last a month and can be had for under $2.
Why the dishonest sensationalism when the real stats prove the point just as well?
just got confused with India and Indiana it happens.
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How is a captive portal site different from AOL?
Because AOL was never a captive portal site. AOL was a portal site and used/sold "Keywords" on the portal page as a type of search engine to direct users to prefered endpoints. But there is/was nothing that prevented users from using Yahoo, AltaVista, Jeeves, or any other search engine, or typing destinations URLs in directly.
Facebook's India initiative is a captive portal. Useers can only use select Facebook services, or services approved/advertised by Facebook. Users can not go to any service/website or transmit any data to anything not approved by Facebook. Facebook's system is more analagous to the dial-up vendor/insular BBSes of the 80's which could only be accessed from terminals locked to particullar dial-up numbers and only allowed information within the same network. Yet Facebook claims to call their servicce "the internet".
Those in the San Francisco vicinity appear to be totally disconnected from everything happening in the rest of the world.
We saw the same kind of shenanigans from Mozilla when it came to Firefox OS. When it became obvious that Firefox OS wasn't anywhere near capable of competing with Android and iOS in first-world markets, Mozilla started going on and on about how Firefox OS was going to appear on cheap phones for second- and third-worlders to use.
But why the fuck would even third-worlders want to use a mobile OS that was remarkably awful according to at least one review? Guess what, they didn't want to use Firefox OS!
It turned out that they could get cheap used Android and iOS phones that, although a few years behind what first-worlders were using, could still run old versions of Android and iOS that were far superior to even the latest versions of Firefox OS.
Firefox OS is perhaps one of the most pathetic software failures we've ever seen. It wasn't even a matter of it being a risky, yet innovative, project that happened to fail. It was a fucking awful idea from the very beginning, and lots of people pointed this out right away! Why the fuck did Mozilla ever think that anyone would want to use a mobile OS that was built on the slowest web engine around, limited developers only to JavaScript, didn't have any useful apps, and was years behind its competitors?! Everything about Firefox OS made sensible people want to scream "WHAT THE FUCK?!"
$2000 for two years of cell phone service in the US, $500 for the phone and $1500 for the service. Right.
No fucking way does it cost $500 to make a middle-of-the-pack phone. And no way does it cost $1500 to deliver that service to you.
It costs $2000 in the U.S. because it is what the market will bear here, and nobody knows any better about the true costs. It's just high enough that people start to bitch about it, but not so much that they can't afford to shell out for it.
Zuckerberg tried to float this in a market that absolutely can't bear $2000 for this sort of service, a market that already knows it can be done for much less, a market that isn't already in a walled garden and doesn't want to be put in one. Good luck trying to squeeze profit from that market. The Indians are more informed consumers than most people in the U.S.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Go back to Reddit.
you're a moron.
How is a captive portal site different from AOL?
Because AOL was never a captive portal site. AOL was a portal site and used/sold "Keywords" on the portal page as a type of search engine to direct users to prefered endpoints. But there is/was nothing that prevented users from using Yahoo, AltaVista, Jeeves, or any other search engine, or typing destinations URLs in directly.
Nothing?
How about:
(1) AOL was founded in 1983
(2) AOL didn't offer Internet access until 1993, a couple of months after it started to offer Usenet access It spent a decade as a captive portal.
AOL was just like Prodigy, CompuServe, GEnie, and other services of it's day: You connected to a service through the public telephone network, and it was a subset of the information available, compared to what you'd get from an ISP, and advertisers had to pay for keywords.
Given that for about $1/month, an Indian person could convert their "captive portal" experience to a "the full Internet" experience, I'm not seeing a large difference here.
The only thing I'm seeing is not-quite-poor people in India posting online in a way that the actually-poor in India can not possibly post online, as to why all the actually-poor people in India shouldn't have *some* access to the Internet.
Because apparently none-is-preferrable-to-some-which-is-not-all.
Is what Zuckerberg is trying to create, an internet that's basically the same as TV, what you get to see is decided by someone else.
Stop using Facebook you're hurting the World.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Because Facebook's intent was to distort the market in ways that may take away that $1/month option and force many more people to rely on only those sites that Facebook approves.
Be realistic: do you really think that Zuckerberg really does anything from a purely altruistic motivation?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
How about:
(1) AOL was founded in 1983
AOL didn't offer Internet access until 1993, a couple of months after it started to offer Usenet access It spent a decade as a captive portal.
AOL was just like Prodigy, CompuServe, GEnie, and other services of it's day: You connected to a service through the public telephone network, and it was a subset of the information available, compared to what you'd get from an ISP, and advertisers had to pay for keywords.,
That is a bit of a revisionist history summary there... AOL was not an internet service provider or even "AOL" in 1983, it was platform attempting to sell a select set of products. And it did not call itself "the internet", for all intents and purposes "the internet" didn;t really exist before the very late 80's/early 90's outside of a very small community.
To quote Wikipedia: ...in October 1989, Quantum changed the service's name to America Online.
AOL began in 1983, as a short-lived venture called Control Video Corporation (or CVC)... Its sole product was an online service called GameLine for the Atari 2600 video game console, after von Meister's idea of buying music on demand was rejected by Warner Bros... In May 1983... [CVC] was near bankruptcy.
On May 24, 1985, Quantum Computer Services... was founded by Jim Kimsey from the remnants of Control Video.... The service was unique from other online services as it used the computing power of the Commodore 64 and the Apple II rather than just a "dumb" terminal....From the beginning, AOL included online games in its mix of products; many classic and casual games were included in the original PlayNet software system. In the early years of AOL the company introduced many innovative online interactive titles and games
So again.. AOL in the early years was never an ISP, it was a service (gaming, not network) provider. AOL wasn't even AOL until 1989. Yes it was then a vendor platform, but it did not call itself the internet or claim to link the world, only to sell a select set of games. I remember first learning about "Hyper Text Linking" in about 1991 on Mac computers... it was this new thing to link documents on your local network. Almost no one then really had an understanding of the internet. If you wanted to communicate with someone across the country or the other side of the world, you dialed into your BBS and downloaded Usenet/mail.
In September 1993, AOL added USENET access to its features....AOL quickly surpassed GEnie, and by the mid-1990s, it passed Prodigy and CompuServe. By 1993, AOL was able to provide public Internet access for its Windows client users.
So AOL started providing "the internet" in 1993. I did not even have an ISP or "the internet" until around 1995. The early 1990s were when BBSes started to disappear/transform into actual internet service providers. The internet, a global set of services as we know it, simply didn't exist before that time. Again, Facebook is claiming to provide "the internet" with its India initiative, when it is really providing "select Facebook".
I reckon that if you offered most Australians FREE internet provided they let somebody else "keep it safe" a lot would go for it.
Anthony
Especially when you consider that the original Netscape Navigator wasn't released until the end of 1994. Christ even Mosaic didn't exist until early '93. And while I had lynx before that that wasn't at all accessible to joe public
Do you think food is human right? .. ...
Why should those that are starving have their choices limited to the couple you might offer them for free?
Isn't better to have no food at all but keep their freedom of choice intact?
I think this is what we would all want. Don't you?
.
That made me think of a funny business opportunity for Zuckerberg. He could resell AOL CDs in India!
First-world ivory-tower head-in-the-clouds narcissistic power-tripping douchebag misunderstands developing nation, loses investment, and shows himself as the ass he is. Nothing to see here, move along.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
$50 is still a lot of money for many Indians.
However the basis problem is the availability of network coverage. Poor people in Indiana villages without any physical access to Internet will get "no signal" if they try to use this free basic things.
This also applies to many living in the larger cities. If you like in a poor neighborhood cell coverage sucks.
But the problem here is not that Zuckerberg was wrong in his paper.
The problem is that he implemented this without taking in feedback or listening to anyone.
He started internet.org which gives us the impression that it's an organisation. But like much done within Google and Facebook this is a top down organisation. Practicality it's just a department of Facebook with Zuckerberg in charge.
They have this form where organisations and people can contact them. But so far there are no evidence that using that form leads anywhere.
Instead when we look at the Free Basic thing we see that who seems to be invited are a few other corporations from the Internet oligarchy.
If internet.org where serious it should have let people become members and then organised them in a useful manner. This ain't rocket science. Fan clubs for example does this with various degrees of success. Usually more success than Internet.org.
Then of course there should have been peer review of Zuckerbergs paper and plans. A decently organised Internet.org should have been able to discuss how to proceed and aggregate information from it's members into a concrete response.
As a result to that Zuckerberg would have known that the mobile network doesn't have the coverage to do what he wanted.
He would have a few suggestions on solutions such as Mesh networking and DTN (delay tolerant networking). He would know that in many places DTN mules carrying laptops or hard drives would be the fastest way to connect those that has no local means of connecting to Internet.
But this is what happens when you have unidirectional brainstorming. One person suggests something, doesn't take input from others, implements and then fails.
This need to be a broader community effort, it can't be a top down initiative from Zuckerberg and a small groups of friends from the Internet oligarchy. That doesn't mean that it must be a democracy. It must be organised in a manner that allows ideas to aggregate and become included.
Irrelevant. The intent of free basics an internet.org is irrelevant. The point is that it failed.
AOL, CompuServe and other pre-internet services failed only after their main marker (1% ers) start having access to Internet.
But before that they were successful corporations.
Why? They had competent customer service and adapted to consumer demands. Because of that they survived far into the Internet age.
Because Facebook's intent was to distort the market in ways that may take away that $1/month option and force many more people to rely on only those sites that Facebook approves.
Be realistic: do you really think that Zuckerberg really does anything from a purely altruistic motivation?
They wanted to keep that option, of the people paying extra. In no documentation, literature, or description of the plan is there ever any intent to take away the option to start paying for the otherwise free OTA service in order to get access to the full Internet.
And no, I don't think that Zuckerberg suffers from an overabundance of altruistic motivation...
Why does India believe that he should, and pay for full Internet access for everyone? We don't even have universal Internet access in the U.S..
That is a bit of a revisionist history summary there... AOL was not an internet service provider or even "AOL" in 1983, it was platform attempting to sell a select set of products. And it did not call itself "the internet", for all intents and purposes "the internet" didn;t really exist before the very late 80's/early 90's outside of a very small community.
Why do you think Facebook calls it "Free Basics" insteac of calling it "The Internet" or "Your Facebook ISP"?
To quote Facebook:
"Free Basics makes the internet accessible to more people by providing them access to a range of free basic services like news, maternal health, travel, local jobs ..."
You want more than basic services? You pay for them.
A month ago, I checked the BSNL plans in India; BSNL is the state owned telecom entity (vs. Airtel and Idea which are private entities). There were many interesting plans.
This is the most interesting frugal plan I found - 500 MB for $1.50, expires in 12 months.
The plans are quite flexible. The $1.50 plan gets you 1 GB, if the expiry date is set to 1 month instead.
There is one for 25 cents - gets you 80 MB with 2 day expiry. You can buy these plans at the counter of many small stores in a minute - Pay the money and tell them your mobile number. They just dial in the refill.
Here is a page with somewhat different plans.
http://www.bsnlteleservices.co...
The cheapest plan here costs just a dime.
Cable Internet starts at $8 for 2 mbps with bandwidth throttling after 30 GB.
Cable TV costs $3. So Internet video is less attractive. Netflix recently launched, but perhaps won't catch on since it costs about the same as US.
So yeah, Facebook wasn't doing much and Internet and critical service access is already very affordable for anyone who can buy a smartphone at $50. Given that this is still a developing country, the enthusiastic online activism for network neutrality was interesting to watch - saying no to short term free stuff, in interest of long term ideals.
Zuckerburg' s approach was in some ways similar to AOL, an approach that stopped being viable in the 1990s.
The point is that nobody wants to use crap devices. Android devices are cheap, and few people want to get online with something cheaper. Both Firefox OS and Free Basics were stupid _business ventures_ because nobody wants to be a customer of them.
The fact that Free Basics ALSO limited which sites you could access is another problem with that idea.
All the more proof that being in the right place at the right time influences success more than anything else in our economy. Not working harder than others, and certainly not being smarter.
Whenever one of these Silicon Valley type 'CEOs' tries to change the world with some idea that isn't within that person's typically very narrow experience, it's ego, not brains--and the only reason they're listened to at all is the fawning media.
I'm kind of astonished you're comparing Facebook now to AOL then without considering any of the historical context.
(1) AOL was founded in 1983
That was the same year the modern internet came into being (TCP/IP supplanted NCP in 1983). It connected a handful of institutions. Offering internet access wouldn't have actually achieved and besides there was no provision in place for commercial or public use. No one would have given AOL access anyway.
There was not much by the way of internetworking in 1983, and frankly even in 1993 when AOL did as you point out offer access, it was still a very different world. What there was in 1983 was a number of BBSs, a few other systems and some very internetworking from TCP/IP, BITNET, UUCP (brand new then), X25, and a whole slew of others not to mention disparate systems hanging on top of them like Usenet etc.
Hell in 1993 BITNET was only just past its peak, X25 loomed large and the UUCP mapping project was still in full swing. I think there was even a publically routable IPX network kicking around at that time. And AOL offered internet access in 1993 which was the first year that a recognisable WWW existed (NCSA Mosaic).
In other words betwen 1983 and 1993, a BBS with little by the way of public routing (though as you point out AOL did run Usenet, so they must have had UUCP running) wasn't just the common thing, it was the only choice because widespread organised and consistent internetworking simply didn't exist.
AOL was just like Prodigy, CompuServe, GEnie, and other services of it's day: You connected to a service through the public telephone network, and it was a subset of the information available, compared to what you'd get from an ISP, and advertisers had to pay for keywords.
That's simply untrue. Not everything was on the nascent TCP/IP iternet then. Plenty of stuff was only on various BBSs and etc. In fact there wasn't much on the internet at all then. Remember internetworked forums and email went via UUCP not TCP back then.
However today, the internet and web exists. Everything online is now on the internet. So, what facebook tried to do now is immeasurably diferent to what AOL did back then.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
(2) AOL didn't offer Internet access until 1993, a couple of months after it started to offer Usenet access It spent a decade as a captive portal.
AOL was just like Prodigy, CompuServe, GEnie, and other services of it's day: You connected to a service through the public telephone network, and it was a subset of the information available, compared to what you'd get from an ISP, and advertisers had to pay for keywords.
I don't think you can blame AOL for the fact the internet was not opened up for commercial use until 1992. The fact that AOL provided a way for John Q. Public to get access to the Internet only months after it was really even an option is pretty impressive actually. Before 1992 if you were on the Internet you either were at a research University, or working for a defense contractor.
You act as if AOL was a walled garden, they started that way but that was because that was all there was and all anyone knew up that point, my recollection is they were actually pretty good about opening up to the wider Internet when it came along. Sure they built on top of what they had, who would do anything else? but I don't recall once the Internet was available AOL ever actively seeking to keep customers inside the walls, they were not blocking ports, or anything like that.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Yeah. Kinda reminds me a of the cloud movement a bit.
IT Admins Group: Where you decide the content
What can you expect from someone who has so much money they can't make the distinction between $2000 and $2.
I'd consider not being subjugated by Facebook & "Selected" services a basic human right and maybe India should too.
Not a single thing in business is ever altruistic, nor should it be. Itbis just business and offering a very specific type of service must not be criminalized. If the issue is the name 'Internet' should not be applied for what Zuckerberg is selling, that I can agree with, but to prevent a company or a person from providing a very specific type of service because you disagree with the features of the service... I do not believe that any government has any real authority to prevent people from using drugs. They oppress people, the collectivists take people's rights away, that is true. But to prohibit distribution of a product or a service based on the so called 'morals' of what, of the collective? Prostitution, drugs AND this network must be legal to offer and to use.
You can't handle the truth.
"Not a single thing in business is ever altruistic"
So everything in business is [word] ?
For profit, that is the word. Profit is what business is about, not altruism nor should it be anything but profit. In a free market capitalist economy profit motive is the most economically sound and moral motive that can exist. Not that we have free market or drugs, prostitution and this business would not be prohibited by the government.
You can't handle the truth.
On my FB account, Zuckerberg invited me to "follow" him. I don't know if I'm annoyed that he didn't "friend" me instead or if I'm nauseated by the fact that over 50 million people "follow" him. I doubt very much that he's changing the world as much as he thinks he is.
Sexual turism alert!!! (the fuck dude, why nb listen 2 me??)
> In no documentation, literature, or description of the plan is there ever any intent to take away the option to start paying for the otherwise free OTA service in order to get access to the full Internet.
That access would be funneled, fairly forcibly, through the Facebook portal. That would help Facebook "monetize" that traffic for destinations other than the Facebook portal itself.
> Not a single thing in business is ever altruistic, nor should it be
That approach to business thinking is surprisingly common place. But there are many non-profit businesses that clearly disagree with this ethical model, and businesses that deal with them have to take the political and social beliefs of their clients into account. Especially at the smaller business level, many employers act out of a shared desire for their employees and their businesses to succeed, and that element of camarederie has real benefits in productivity and product quality.
So yes, such "altruism" is a real factor and affects business decisions every day.
Ok, so in business altruism is ok and and at times it is the primary motive. But you mean that in capitalism the profit motive is primary.
Marc Andreessen's comments on India and its free internet program - clarification:
It is not that Internet is expensive in India. Unlike parts of Europe and US, strangely India (although developing country and at times poor), it is actually well connected. It has good fibre backbones in its cities and excellent mobile internet connectivity too.
The world has certain quick assumptions about poor/developing countries and that reflects the Marc Andressen's comments about India. But what they fail is to understand the roots where it came from, not just about India, it can be about Egypt, Japan, China, Middle-east, Africa, Latin-America, Europe, USA just about any human race. Which is why I shot the "Clarification" Youtube video as a response to this entire confusion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXxU2IYtMB8
That access would be funneled, fairly forcibly, through the Facebook portal. That would help Facebook "monetize" that traffic for destinations other than the Facebook portal itself.
Yes. And if people paid for the data service themselves, while still using the Facebook supplied device, they would be able to avoid the "funneling".
So your fear comes down to people not finding such funneling to be onerous enough that they would pay, and that in that case, the funneling would damage your economic interests.
Obviously: you are free to either partner with Facebook, and avoid this for just your economic interests, or pay the $1/month for the unrestricted access for the people who are being funneled, and give them access to "the whole internet".
I do not see you stepping up to the plate and providing an unrestricted service.
In every way.
If you ever wonder if your argument is disingenuous bullshit, just look for phrases like this in it -
I do not see you stepping up to the plate and providing an unrestricted service.
How is a captive portal site different from AOL?
Because AOL was never a captive portal site. AOL was a portal site and used/sold "Keywords" on the portal page as a type of search engine to direct users to prefered endpoints. But there is/was nothing that prevented users from using Yahoo, AltaVista, Jeeves, or any other search engine, or typing destinations URLs in directly.
That eventually became the case, but originally AOL didn't provide any Internet service and was a completely closed network. Only eventually did they allow things like "email" that could actually be sent outside of AOL's network and then eventually an AOL browser. Only much later did it essentially become an ISP with a homepage/splash screen that came up when you used the client to login.
I agree you shouldn't call it "Internet Service" if it is a closed network or even if you are throttling various competing services. That should be a matter of stopping fraudulent advertising rather than preventing companies from offering BBN or old school AOL style service.
Because Facebook's intent was to distort the market in ways that may take away that $1/month option and force many more people to rely on only those sites that Facebook approves.
I think from a competitive free market versus regulation perspective the question is whether or not there was some resource constraint on bandwidth that meant that the government had a good reason to want to make sure that only Internet Service could be provided over the network rather than a closed network. If we are talking about EM spectrum, then it has been long established that the government has an interest in specifying to some degree of detail the types of services that license holders may provide. It makes sense to me that India would say that only full Internet access could be provided over cellular networks as spectrum is a limited resource and to allow walled off services is to squander a public resource.
"Facebook's Free Basics was an ill-conceived effort to bring Internet^H^H^H^H^H^H^HFacebook access to the poor in India."
For similar reasons.
telcomms want their customers to pay them directly for each extra thing. Free access to open internet is disruptive "giving it away" according to them. It's freeing their captive market.
Facebook also wants everyone to be on facebook, not the open internet, so that all the ad revenue comes to them.
Free basics - nice strategy to keep the customers within the (pay) walls - if you can get away with it.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
I still don't really see much of a problem with them offering the service - it's free. I have a problem if they make that service mandatory. I also noticed this gem in the summary:
...which is more than a Free Basics user will consume in a month...
Holy shit that's a huge assumption to make. How did they conclude what a Free Basics user would have consumed in a month? Facebook has video, audio, and other "rich" content - or so I'm told. Wikipedia has videos and music and even has articles that will read themselves aloud to you now. How the hell did they conclude that?
I'd have a problem if this were being offered as an exclusionary service but that doesn't appear to be the case. It's not that I like Facebook or anything (I don't even have an account) but that I'm of the opinion that something is better than nothing. Does this target the poorest of the poor? Nope. Not at all. Nobody's doing anything for them either. It targets those who might otherwise have nothing for connectivity. It gives them some access. I see nothing wrong with offering it as a choice.
I do see everything wrong with making it the only solution. Maybe I'm mistaken? I'm kind of big on letting people make their own choices. I'm okay with people making choices that I'd not personally make. You're usually pretty smart, what am I missing here?
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I double checked the dictionary for fear that I was mistaken about the definition for disingenuous. Are you sure that's the word you're going for? 'Cause that seems pretty straight forward to me. Are you or are you not going to provide access for the people who can't afford it in India?
Also, while we look at that $1 and say, "Oh, that's not much." There's a whole swath of people in India who can't even afford that - but still have access to something less expensive. If you spent a minute or two outside of your bubble, you'd be aware of this. Try going to India sometime and getting the fuck out of the tour group and having a look around. Don't worry, they won't bite. They're just poor. They're otherwise decent human beings.
You'll begrudge them any access at all because you're... What? You don't want them to be better educated? You don't want them to have access to Wikipedia? You hate Facebook? Then step up to the plate and offer something better. All you're doing is reinforcing the caste system.
"Oh no! Those untouchables will be on my internet!" Seriously, what's wrong with letting them *choose* to have this? I do have a problem if it's their only option. I do have a problem if they are forced to use it. I have no problem if they are allowed to choose it. So far, nobody has given a good reason why people should not be able to make that choice. So far, nobody has offered an alternative that doesn't rely on the good graces of someone other than them.
As near as I can tell, it's just a bunch of people who are jealous that someone might get something they don't have, don't want, but might result in the untouchables being on their internet. It's justification for perpetuating the caste system. Are you guys seriously worried that they might learn something and better themselves? Are you worried that they'll fuck off all day on Facebook games? Are you worried that they'll communicate with their friends and family? WTF?
This makes NO sense to me. Is it altruistic? Of course not. Does it solve all the problems? Don't be daft. Does it target the poorest of the poor? That's a stupid question too. Yet, in these two threads now, I've seen all those as complaints. I've seen not one realistic solution offered that didn't rely on taking something from somebody else - and probably out of jealousy at one end and greed at the other. Why the hell is it wrong for people to be able to make a choice?
It becomes wrong when they have no choice. Right now, they have no choice. This at least gives them an option. Is it perfect? Hell no. Is it better than nothing? Buggered if I know - I should think you'd let THEM decide. But no, this is just India being India and continuing their oppressive behaviors at the behest of the moneyed akin to their traditional caste system that they claim to have outlawed in one breath but is still heavily practices across their country. Go to India... Get off the tour bus and walk around. You're cheering their continued deprivation.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Heh... I just noticed that one of my responses in the thread was actually to an AC who'd attempted a "rebuttal" to one of your comments. Again... I'm still flabbergasted. I really am... I have no idea why we're cheering the propagation of the caste system instead of starting to remove the barriers. They don't want the untouchables on their 'net? Maybe? I don't get it... Ah well. Here's the link:
http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...
I'm gonna post this as AC and save my post count. You know where to find me and I won't see replies to this. ;-) KGIII
Do you also see nothing wrong with the alleged "Standard Oil tactics" - the big player lowers prices in an area, long enough to drive smaller players out of business and then raise prices to recoup the "investment" ? This model lets "people make their own choices". The only similarity with free basics is that both these models are big on letting people make their own choices at present, and long term choices are limited.
For other examples of choices, think about first dose of addictive drugs being served free to non-adults, or Microsoft bribing Government officials everywhere to make online Government-Citizen interactions only through Windows.
Facebook itself couldn't have risen if something like this was present and served only MySpace pages. No competitor can rise in such an environment, not only of Facebook, but of any entrenched internet service that has some money. In internet services, there are enough natural barriers of entry even before we create more with services like Free Basics.
Anyway, in India, this is what swung the debate against "free basics".
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
> I'm kind of big on letting people make their own choices. I'm okay with people making choices that I'd not personally make. You're usually pretty smart, what am I missing here?
Given that's in response to my post "The point is that nobody wants to use crap devices", I'd say we're more or less on the same page. I said nobody wants it; I didn't say it should be illegal.
> So your fear comes down to people not finding such funneling to be onerous enough that they would pay, and that in that case, the funneling would damage your economic interests.
Please do not transform my pointing out the limitations built into the system as "my fear" about its purposes. As a concept the walled gardens for poor communities are interesting. But to claim that it wouldn't limit, or control, access to the rest of the Internet would be misleading. Even if it's not apparent in the initial design, I, at least, cannot imagine Facebook would not monetize their portal's connections to the rest of the Internet by selling metadata about their users, or through direct ad insertion. And they _must_ throttle those external gateways, or a very few abusive clients will consume all the bandwidth at the expense of the whole project.
Indeed. And I see what I was missing. I thought I was missing something! Alright, I'll see if I can help - if you want. ;-) It seems you've been misled.
No, lots of people wanted this. It's also *not* specific hardware. I don't know what you are already familiar with - I spent a bit of time researching this when I learned about it. Let's just say that some of the presentation of the material is a little biased. (Even outright dishonest.) I'll try to make it short but I'm not sure what you know of the actual truth - there's been a whole lot of disinformation going on here. That's what I was missing - I thought you knew that.
Facebook wants to *continue* to offer a service that let's people access part the internet for free. They're still allowed to access the regular internet. This doesn't require any special device. This doesn't need any separate hardware - if you've got a smart phone (Android) then you can have free internet. They're in no way restricted from accessing the rest of the internet. Accessing the rest of the internet is seamless and doesn't incur any expenses other than what they'd normally have paid for that same access. It is not more expensive, it is not crippled, it is completely open per India's regulations. They were already doing this.
Any developer is free to apply to be included in this subset of free site but they may be turned down. This doesn't block people from accessing other sites - it just doesn't charge them for visiting certain sites such as Wikipedia, weather, news, jobs, many others and, of course, Facebook. Any developer who wishes to apply can do so. They may be allowed, they may not. If they do so then they *also* must have a low bandwidth version (like the low bandwidth versions for all the other sites - but bandwidth total for the user is not limited) of their site that must also be fully functional. Again, they can be turned down for inclusion and that's a little sketchy but nobody gets to pay to be automatically included. They were already offering, before being shut down, access to over 100 sites for free.
The TRIA is actually made up of people from competing ISPs and appear to be corrupt as all hell. They got a bunch of people riled up - almost a year ago, when Facebook was getting this rolling. They put a petition up for people to sign in protest. Except, they put the petition online. Yes, online... Even if there were a competing petition, the folks who want this can't exactly go sign it.
A number of people are advocating for it - including some of the lower cost ISPs, who won't really be making a whole lot on this. The COIA (Cellular group - not just traditional ISPs) is one such agency that supports this. They speak for all the little cellular companies that are members. I don't think we've got anything similar here in the US. The TRIA is government, the COIA is industry.
Late last year, Reliance said nearly one million people had tried Free Basics.
That was just in the startup phase - and that's just India (they also operate elsewhere).
Through mobile-phone providers, Facebook offers Free Basics in nearly 40 countries, but nowhere else has the program been as controversial as in India, where it has sparked fierce debate over whether it unfairly favors some services over competitors.
Baby Center LLC, a parenting informational site owned by Johnson & Johnson, says more than 5.5 million people have visited its site globally through Free Basics, including in India.
There's no special hardware needed - beyond a cell phone that it runs on (I think it's just Android). They had it. They were using it. They liked it. They wanted it.
Anyhow, here's some citations for all that. The WSJ is the best of 'em all, that I've found. There are others. Nah, people do *want* this. They were happy with it and, on top of that, they were doing it intelligently. Namely, they were sucking down all the free stuff they could get bu
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Do you actually know how this works? No, really? If you've not looked beyond the Slashdot headlines, you might not understand. This is an application, a free download, that enables people to use a subset of the internet at no cost. They can still use the regular 'net. There's no restrictions on that. This is just free. Any developer can apply and make a fully functional, low-bandwidth, method and *maybe* get access. That's a little sketchy but that's how it is. They didn't charge people extra money for regular internet access - they still were charged for non-free content at regular prices. The application didn't actually stop anyone from accessing the rest of the 'net. Use of the application wasn't mandatory.
It was in place, it had over a million users, and then people complained. It's in use in over 40 other countries, quite happily. It wasn't income based, anyone could download it and use it - until they banned it. It doesn't target the poorest of the poor, that's true. It's not entirely altruistic, that's true. It enabled people access to over 100 sites at no cost. There were no bandwidth restrictions for those 100 sites and, by all objective accounts, they were mostly good sites including things like Johnson and Johnson's parenting help, Wikipedia, jobs, weather, emergency alerts, and Facebook - of course.
So, now those people who were using it have nothing. What they did have wasn't perfect. It was better than nothing and many people were able to get the things they'd normally get for free which allowed them to afford access to more things that weren't free. (Free as in beer, obviously.) They were happy with this choice, they knew what they were doing, and they now have had their freedom of choice taken away from them. That's not a cause to celebrate!
Your analogies make no sense to me and I'm not sure why you'd begrudge poor people some information. That simply makes no sense to me. You want to force them to go without. The only logical conclusion I can reach is that you want to keep them impoverished, uneducated, and off your internet. The caste system is officially illegal but it's still heavily practiced. Maybe it's time to accept the "untouchables" on the internet, they won't spoil it. It's not like this limited their choice and the speculation about them being locked into it is demonstrably false.
I posted a number of relevant links in my reply to Ray if you're curious. They had nice free, limited, access. Now, they have no access unless they scrape up the money to pay for it. It's not ideal but it's better than nothing. You're literally begrudging them information because of your desire to control others. "You can't have that. I don't want you to. It is not good enough. You need to go without access or go without food if you want access." I do not understand that mentality. It's not a drug, it's not oil, it's access to information in a choice people were happy to make but you're gleeful that they've been deprived of that liberty.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Facebook is not a pro-free-speech company. You need look no further than their restrictions on gun sales to see that.
Yeah yeah, I know people who used it., they knew it was a trap but a pleasant one at the moment.
Why don't the analogies make sense? In the alleged standard oil model- why shouldn't a company be able to offer customers cheaper oil on company's own expense? Why do people begrudge customers cheaper oil?
Facebook is quite similar to drugs, people do get hooked.
Still, I do find it interesting that you are making emotional arguments rather than confront the logic of my argument - inspire real confidence that you have thought this through.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.