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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.
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?
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".
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!