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Facebook Is Talking To the White House About Giving You 'Free' Internet (washingtonpost.com)
Facebook is in talks with the government and wireless carriers to bring its 'Free Basics' internet service to the United States, reports Washington Post, citing sources. If everything goes as planned for Facebook, it would target "low-income and rural Americans who cannot afford reliable, high-speed internet at home or on smartphones," (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled; alternate source) the paper adds. From the report: Exactly what specific services would be offered in the U.S. app has not been determined. But the idea to bring Free Basics to the United States is likely to rekindle a long-running debate about the future of the Internet. On one side are those who view services such as Facebook's as a critical tool in connecting underserved populations to the Internet, in some cases for the first time. On the other side are those who argue that exempting services from data caps creates a multitiered playing field that favors businesses with the expertise and budgets to participate in such programs. The fight over this tactic, known as "zero-rating," has largely taken place overseas where local start-ups are mixing with globally established firms in still-nascent Internet economies. But a launch of Free Basics would bring the discussion to U.S. shores in a major way.India banned Free Basics program in the country earlier this year, stating that Facebook's initiative violates net neutrality. The government told Facebook to open Free Basics so that underserved Indians could access any website that would like -- as opposed to select websites handpicked by Facebook. The government added that if it is not feasible for Facebook to offer unlimited access to every website, it could look into introducing limited monthly data plans (like 500MB or 1GB for users). India was not open to the idea of Facebook offering users access to select websites.
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It's like if McDonalds reached out to the government to start a "free lunch" program...
crazy dynamite monkey
Memo to Zuckerberg: If you want to give poor people 'free internet', then give them free internet, not the 2016 version of AOL. I agree with India on this: This idea violates the concept of net neutrality. You either give people complete access, or give them no access, you should not get to decide what they do and do not have access to.
If free basics was 64kbps to access anything on the web (basically what tmobile, etc.. do when you run out of data) then I might be ok with it.
If free basics was html only and no video/multimedia then this again might be ok.
I'm completely against zero rating but if you did it this way then you are basically giving a low bandwidth "text only" version of the web away for free.
It makes no sense the other way where facebook is exempt but linkedin isn't because it didn't pay the right person.
Now if facebook wants to pay my my cellular provider for my bandwidth usage (and pay the same consumer rate I do) then I would be ok with that too.
It would have to be closely watched though so that you don't end up with a tiered web where the only sites most people visit are the ones that are "free".
Don't worry. Mark Zuckerberg and Washington DC politicians are working on a plan to solve all your problems.
On one side are those who view services such as Facebook's as a critical tool
I'm not seeing facebook as a critical tool...
Let me translate that: "Free" meaning "Give Facebook all your personal information and let us monitor everything you do."
We all know Facebook sells influence, and being able to tap into a new market allows them the opportunity to sell more influence. I have yet to find a truly charitable cooperation so it a guarded approach makes sense. Kudos to India for seeing through this, allowing an entity influence over your poor is a fools move.
Can you explain what would be wrong with McDonald's offering free lunches to some people? As long as no-one was coerced to accept these lunches, I'd say this would be a wonderful development.
It may be that these free lunches would be unhealthy, or that they would cause children to get used to eating a lot of McDonald's food. But the people who would be offered these lunches could decide for themselves whether they want the food. There are other ways of getting food too.
The situation here is the same: Facebook offering "free internet" which is primarily good for using Facebook is certainly good for Facebook. But since this offering doesn't prevent other ISPs from making competing offers (either free or for-pay), this offering simply provides people more choices which inherently cannot make them worse off. Are we really so much smarter than Facebook's potential customers that we know for sure that they would prefer no service to Facebook's crippled one?
Your fun at partys
Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.
Oh. Sorry. I thought we were speaking Tamarian.
Betting the acronym TANSTAAFL never even thinks of coming close to these discussions...
(or if they do, the sentence "We'll tell 'em that e're gonna make the one-percenters will pay for it!" will be uttered, followed by a lot of laughter...)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
This isn't a question about whether poor people should have free internet access. (there will be a lot of people for and against that for various reasons).
This is against Facebook abusing and manipulating their power to promote specific websites and potentially strangling their rivals using government money to do so.
Everyone should be able to agree that Facebook shouldn't be able to take government funds to strengthen their own product and weaken their rivals in a pseudo-claim that they're doing it for the poor. That's called corruption.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
They'd spy on it no matter what, that's not the issue here.
The issue here is that this internet is "free" because they would have direct access to everything you do on their "free" internet, which in Facebook's case means they'll be building ever larger dossiers on all the unfortunate sods stuck on this garbage.
Clearly they'll do this anyway, but this just cuts out the Facebook webbug middle man and feeds your internet activity directly into FB's data gathering apparatus. I'm sure the terms of service for this shit full of "consumer protection" and "privacy guarentees". By which they mean "we'll protect you by keeping you in FBs walled garden" and "we guarentee to abuse your privacy in every way possible".
Tag this monstrosity as "donotwant"
Then India is right.
What about "giving" free access to Conservapedia?
And what would be so bad about that exactly? You just don't like it because it expresses a point of view you despise. But nothing would be stopping someone from freely distributing Liberalpedia.
Some access is better than nothing, and if it's limited enough people will not use it - something as narrow as a "storefront only" wifi would be used by few indeed, even by people that liked the site!
Facebook's approach is a good compromise. It would give people a fair amount of access to family and also useful online tools, even if it's not the "full internet". But for really poor areas it would be a huge boon.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
And it's not "free internet". It's "free Facebook". Which is more than slightly different.
Maybe Trump? I mean, he's promised making someone build something and pay for it, too, before...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Betting the acronym TANSTAAFL never even thinks of coming close to these discussions
Of course TANSTAAFL. There is always a price to pay. But for a poor person with no Internet, is it worth seeing some ads to get it? I think most poor people would say yes. I use plenty of ad supported services, even though I am not poor, just cheap.
I'm mostly concerned that it would set a potentially dangerous precedent. It starts with free access to a limited internet and gradually works towards the norm of paying for a limited internet.
Our bugs are smarter than your test scripts.
Maybe you should buy a pharmaceutical company and jack up the price on some low cost drug....
Everyone -- absolutely everyone -- who is posting on Slashdot against the idea already has Internet access!
"I've got mine, and screw everyone else, even if getting a cut-down version would be astronomically better than what they currently have!"
The "I've got mine" attitude works a whole lot more for a limited commodity, not so well as adding another node to a network. Plus, given that this wireless Facebook access wouldn't allow for access to Slashdot, it's not hypocritical to the Slashdot crowd.
I would certainly not mind if Zuckerberg wanted to give poor people free internet. Hell, I'd chip in, I think the idea is awesome! I can't stand that sleazebag and I would probably only hand him a glass of water if he was already drowning, but if he actually did that, I would actually say that at least something good came out of the total surveillance tool that Facebook is.
But that is not the case. He is exactly NOT offering free internet to the poor. What his "generous offer" is, is that these people will get access to Facebook. There is not a single altruistic fiber in this move. It's an attempt to corner the market, on the expense of people who already have nothing.
One could now argue "but hey, at least they get Facebook!" Yes, that would be an argument. Except that this also means that it is unfeasible for an ISP to even attempt getting a foot into a "poor" area where they might not get a lot of customers, but at least a few. But that way, they will not get enough, which also means that poor people who would make the sacrifice to pay for "real"internet access (to give their kids a chance to have access to more knowledge and research information) don't even get the chance to do so.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Anyone who ever played any kind of Cyberpunk game has wondered why the hell decks and net access are so damn expensive. I mean, computers and internet are already dirt cheap in our world today, and they'd only get cheaper as time goes by.
The reason gets clearer every day, what makes decks and decker access expensive is that the access is not limited by what you may see and no DRM clogs your deck that limits what software may run...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I want nothing from, nor to do with Facebook. Ever.
They can take their thinly veiled and disingenuous charity and stuff it up their rectums.
It will be called FBI - Face Book Internet.
I think the OP is retarded...
If Facebook gets it set up so everyone has free access to all their cloned services while having to pay for the originals that's going to give them a huge advantage
Maybe it's a huge advantage (though how many non-care Facebook services have you used and then abandoned?).
But it also is a GIANT expense for Facebook, in terms of hardware and support. In that sense you could say that other competitors would be on equal footing in terms of being able to turn a profit on paid services, they may have somewhat fewer customers but lots less overhead.
In return though, you have literally a whole class of people that almost never use the internet now that would access to decent internet everywhere. That is far better than some crappy "poor people only" Texternet the person you were responding to proposed. It would give a lot of the very poorest people equal educational opportunity with anyone in the world, including the upper echelons of wealth.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
> On one side are those who view services such as Facebook's as a critical tool
I started wondering who these freaks might be, but then I realized its probably mostly employees of car dent repair shops.
Get the Obama/Democratic White House behind this idea.
Not only will it enable another freebie giveaway, but left-leaning Zuckerberg will also be supplying an ideologically curated platform of left wing messages to the unwashed masses, ensuring that Democratic ideology remains front and center.
Article keeps using the word "app," like this is software from Facebook that you execute and then it .. does something. Would this "app" be a UI to the internet, or does it create a new interface that other software can use, or what?
It sounds like it might be AOL. Is this AOL?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Given the limited access provided by this program elsewhere in the world, it needs to be spelled: 'Free' 'Internet'
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
If it's Zuck's idea, then let HIM pay for it!
I can barely pay all my bills now. I don't need another tax to pay.
I thought that in a democracy the politicians are voted for and represent the people. It looks to me that in America politicians are voted by the people are represent businesses. Why do we always hear about politicians talking with businesses, rather than people and their advocates?
No, that's what makes these talks so suspicious.
If a private corporation 'talks' to 'the government', then it's almost exclusively either about collusion and corruption or it is plain fascism.
Also, don't forget the large amount of Facebook shares that Goldman Sachs owns. They invested heavily in this company.
Why? Cashless society of course. If everybody has 'free' internet, it's easy to implement exclusively digital financial transactions.
And guess how big your (negative) interest will be and where your data is going.
And guess what happens if you express opinions that Zuckerberg et. al. don't like? You'll get shut off. No more food, no more groceries, no more access to your money. Of course due to a 'technical glitch'.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
Is this the same company that wants to quadruple the H1B visa holders to undermine the already depressed US Information Technology sector?
It's like a drug dealer offering a few free doses to those poor folk who cannot afford to get started on the habit on their own
The issue for myself and many others is not so much the advertising but the data aggregation and control/censorship-by-exclusion inherent in such a system. It will literally become FBInet in more ways than one.
I see this as a way to corral the masses living on entitlements into an internet 'safe space' ("safe" as defined by TPTB) where information can be controlled and individuals and their communications monitored.
Once such a system was rolled out and the masses flood to it and away from regular ISPs, the rates ISPs would have to charge with a massive reduction in customers would necessarily have to skyrocket, thus forcing even more people onto the 'free but "managed"' internet. The result? A gradually increasing balkanization of the internet divided between the proles and members of the oligarchy with the proles receiving the "government-approved, FB-friendly, child-safe, terrist/pedo-free, RIAA/MPAA-approved" version.
Goebbels or Stalin would be SO jealous!
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
This is against Facebook abusing and manipulating their power to promote specific websites and potentially strangling their rivals using government money to do so.
That's just the thing, though, isn't it?
This is about "zero-rating", meaning that there is no government money involved.
I know that it's fashionable to not ready the articles before commenting, but had you read the article, this will be paid for by Facebook, the carriers (as a loss-leader to get people to buy into paid data plans instead), and by the major web sites that would be accessible without code (including, but not limited to, Facebook).
If they were spending tax dollars on it, that'd be one thing, but talking to the White House to get your political pull lined up to allow you to offer something at your own cost, instead of having the public pay for it? That's not spending tax dollars.
Everyone -- absolutely everyone -- who is posting on Slashdot against the idea already has Internet access!
"I've got mine, and screw everyone else, even if getting a cut-down version would be astronomically better than what they currently have!"
The "I've got mine" attitude works a whole lot more for a limited commodity, not so well as adding another node to a network. Plus, given that this wireless Facebook access wouldn't allow for access to Slashdot, it's not hypocritical to the Slashdot crowd.
Actually, it is.
The people who already pay for Internet access are the ones bitching about other people not paying, if they don't care about web sites too poor to help pay for the subsidy to allow access to their sites.
There's no question that it's anticompetitive against poor sites -- but given that the target market aren't seeing any sites right now, them continuing to not see your site because your company is unwilling to help pay for subsidy access really could mean three different things:
1. (the one you want it to mean) People don't get the full Internet for free, and so they should get absolutely no Internet instead, because it's somehow better for them that, if they can't look at my site using the subsidy service, they should simply have no Internet access whatsoever.
2. (the one I think it actually means) Your company is a cheap ass company that wants any free offering to include it without having to pay their fair share of the access subsidy so they get whitelisted with the other altruistic companies.
3. (the "dog in the manger" version) I have Internet access I pay for, and if some sites are free to other people, they should be free to me, too, but I have some cheapskate sites that I like to go to, so they shouldn't have to pay, but I shouldn't have to pay either.
And if you don't think Internet access is a limited quantity, I invite you to spend a summer in La Verkin, Utah -- Population 4,060, and not worth U.S. West's time to put in high speed network access for anyone.
There is not a single altruistic fiber in this move. It's an attempt to corner the market, on the expense of people who already have nothing.
This would be the lucrative market of "advertising things people can't afford to people who have no money to buy them in the first place"?
I'm thinking that the pre-dot.bomb Internet is calling, and they say they want their business model back.
Because it breaks Net Neutrality.
I give India credit for being smart.
Actually, India said "no" for two large reasons:
(1) There was a specific Indian Internet startup that has about 5% of the Jobs Board market, and they were about to be shut out of the market that Facebook was about to open up by providing Jobs Board access to pretty much everyone -- only not their Jobs Board. Rather than pay the entry fee, and join the subsidy group of web sites, this startup decided to spend the money they would have spent on that lobbying against the idea, and buying as many politicians as they could.
(2) The jobs market in India is highly competitive, and this would have opened up the "haves" to competition from the "have nots", in terms of people applying for the same jobs that they felt were rightfully theirs. In other words: it was egalitarian, and based on whether you had sufficient merit to compete in the jobs marketplace, rather than being based on your social standing (i.e. read as: can afford to pay for Internet access in order to apply for the jobs in question).
In the first case, it was potentially raising a barrier to new startups who could not afford the buy-in; the buy-in was subsequently restructured as a "percentage of net revenue", so as to be non-discriminatory against smaller companies (but by then, the trigger had been pulled on the "Net Neutrality" gun).
In the second case, however, it was simply the people with Internet access being anti-competition from those "lower caste" persons who currently don't have the access, but who would potentially be winning jobs away from "higher caste" persons.
---
I can understand an insistence on a percentage of net profits being able to "buy access", even if that amounts to nothing more than $1/year, so as to not create a barrier to entry, but I really can't fathom building a wall between the people who can afford Internet access and people who canb't afford Internet access, and then forcing the people who can't afford Internet access to pay for its construction.
(and if that hit a little close to home for some people -- good: it was intended to).
Don't worry. Mark Zuckerberg and Washington DC politicians are working on a plan to solve all your problems.
Business and government working together...controlling mass communication and information platforms...I know there's a name for that! Something that started with an 'F', I think...
Oh well, I'm sure it's nothing to worry about!
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Yeah, and they want the governments to lay down the hardware to support the project. You think that's free too? Or that Facebook is paying for that? Nothing the government does is free.
Even Facebook bringing this up is costing the government (you and I) money in discussing this.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Zuck maybe the most dangerous silicon billionaire of all.
The hardware is "existing cellular infrastructure and telephone handsets to be provided by the carriers".
Still not seeing the government paying for anything.
I agree that them discussing it at all is time politicians could be better spending doing things like honoring their campaign promises (e.g. closing GITMO), but realistically: if you pay a politician for access, you get access.
You can "dude" and "bro" me all you want.
The point is that Facebook is willing to pay to get people without any access service to the point that they have at least some access .
Bitching about that access not leading to all possible places on the Internet is like bitching about the food bank not guaranteeing that the food they give you is Halal food.
And if you don't think Internet access is a limited quantity, I invite you to spend a summer in La Verkin, Utah -- Population 4,060, and not worth U.S. West's time to put in high speed network access for anyone.
It sounds like people in La Verkin do have internet access, just perhaps at the speeds you want. My point is that adding everyone in La Verkin doesn't reduce my ability to access the internet.
Here's a rebuttal to a rebuttal by Indian VC Mahesh Murthy when Facebook tried to introduce its Free Basics here last year. This attempt came just after a backlash against local mobile operator Airtel, who wanted to charge extra for using Whatsapp and Viber since they claimed to be losing money on SMS revenue as a result.
Read this piece to see the FUD that FB has been spreading and how it was countered.
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."
It probably isn't. After all, Facebook wasn't.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."