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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.
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."
I think that link has a 300 MB 28 day plan for $1.50 per month, so it's not like the poster is too far off in saying that one third of that would cost less than an dollar.
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".
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.