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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.
How dare you insult gardens like that!!!
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."
...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".
$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!
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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?