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.

Comments

Re:How is a captive portal site different from AOL

[whoever57]

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.

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?