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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.
$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!
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.
The people giving you crap are missing the point. Where do they think those old phones and computers are going? As noted in TFA, Data is cheap in India, so an old bit of kit that isn't restricted is much preferable to a ecosystem that Kim Jung Il would approve of.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.