Facebook Will Still Back Internet.org Despite Indian Gov't Disdain For Free Basics

Mickeycaskill writes: Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg says Facebook will continue its Internet.org efforts in India, despite one of the initiative's programs – Free Basics – being banned by the country last month. Internet.org hopes to give more people access to the Internet, but India ruled 'Free Basics,' which offers free access to Facebook and selected apps and services violated net neutrality ethics. Speaking at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Zuckberg said the ban was "disappointing" for Internet.org's mission but hoped other programs such as satellite Internet and drones would be more successful. "It's crazy we're sitting here in 2016 and still, four billion people in the world don't have access to the Internet," he said. "In India we'll focus on different programs. We want to work with all the operators there."

Comments

Re:fuck off zuckerfuck

[TheRaven64]

No one should donate anything

Some donations are good, some are bad. Mother Teresa objected to foreign medical aid donations because they allowed the government to abrogate responsibility for helping its own citizens. Sometimes when you donate something, you end up reducing its local value to such a degree that you destroy the ability for anyone to produce it locally, which ends up just fostering dependence without doing anything to alleviate the underlying problems.

But that's irrelevant because we're not talking about donations here, we're talking about illegal cross subsidy. Facebook is not donating money to fund access to the Internet, they are subsidising the sale of devices to access Facebook so that they can sell eyeballs to advertisers. This kind of market distortion is exactly the sort of thing that antitrust laws exist to prevent.