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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!
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".