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Facebook is misleading Indians with its full-page ads about Free Basics
31–40 of 262 posts
Re: Facebook is misleading Indians with its full-page ads about Free Basics
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
I apologize if I came across condescending, I was try to set contrast here. For the activists its an intellectual/idealogical crusade, and for the poor people it is a way of life thing. On other note, there are desperate patients and families who are willing to risk their health and are trying hard to get access to drugs that are in clinical trails even in OECD countries.
Poor people are there everywhere in the world. It's just surprising that Facebook decided to help the poor in India before doing anything for the poor in the US. Especially given the fact that the data costs are huge in US. Facebook can decide to do what it wants,but this type of spending on propaganda trying to change the policy in India is not acceptable and maybe not even legal. Not sure,but would it be allowed fo…
Mark Zukerberg donated $100 million to Newark Schools, which I think is helping economically backward students. Internet penetration in US is huge, and there are several subsidies in place esp. in urban areas. Internet connectivity problems in US are mostly for rural and geographically distant locations. So comparing US vs India especially based on per KB costs does not give complete picture and MZ, told again again the mission of facebook is "connecting people" (that was nokia's tag line ;D )
There are full page ads in India for all sorts of things. Damn, if shell enough money, they would put a full page ad about my post in Hacker News. NYT and WaPo are in a different ball park, but they too at times are open to full page ads, what is illegal about that?
Re: Facebook is misleading Indians with its full-page ads about Free Basics
#33Even if this is entirely well-intentioned, which is certainly up for debate, it sets a precedent that will eventually see the world's most powerful media corporations become gatekeepers of the internet. The web has been so successful because of any one of us can fire up a text editor and create the next phenomenon without spending a single dollar or seeking anyone's permission. This is not charity, it is a coup d'éta…
Let us not judge from Intellectual Ivory towers, the facts on the ground are 80% of Indians do not have internet access. You sometimes have to try "impure" methods. The question is still up in the air, whether FB Basics is gateway to full internet or if it is a walled garden. Either way, it is better than No Access. The immediate retort I get is, why not facebook provide free internet access to poor. Guys, is it thei…
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/internet/aircel-to-...
There are better ways of giving out Internet for free. By giving out slower internet. Or internet with a free data cap. Or a way of "earning" Internet data after watching some ads (see: Grameenphone in Bangladesh). I'd somewhat agree with the "Some Internet is better than No internet" argument, except that there are better ways of doing the "some Internet" which Facebook isn't doing.
> why not facebook provide free internet access to poor.
Facebook isn't even paying for the data in Free Basics. The telecom operators are (I assume their business plan is to get more people hooked onto the Internet so eventually more customers for them. A valid plan.). They can use the same business plan (in a net neutral way) for the slower internet or internet with a data cap options; and I believe that's what Aircel is doing.
(Aside: When you look at it this way it becomes even more obvious how devious Facebook is here -- without putting in money of their own to finance the actual data, they, a third party, jumped in and convinced telecom operators to enact a scheme which Facebook has a lot of control over despite not being the primary financers of the scheme. They get lots of credit and lots of control, without actually doing anything. When framed this way the parallels with the Brits' takeover of India seem a lot more real.)
And really, the "no access" part of your argument isn't really well founded either. For most, data plan costs aren't the barrier to internet access (in fact, a smartphone capable of working with the modern internet[1] is more expensive than a few years' worth of basic data).
[1]: Fun fact: Facebook's mobile app evolves pretty fast and becomes unusable on older phones either due to browser compatibility, OS compatibility, or speed issues. Same with many other sites and apps.
Re: Facebook is misleading Indians with its full-page ads about Free Basics
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let us not judge from Intellectual Ivory towers, the facts on the ground are 80% of Indians do not have internet access. You sometimes have to try "impure" methods. The question is still up in the air, whether FB Basics is gateway to full internet or if it is a walled garden. Either way, it is better than No Access. The immediate retort I get is, why not facebook provide free internet access to poor. Guys, is it thei…
The question is still up in the air, whether FB Basics is gateway to full internet or if it is a walled garden. I think it's a gateway to popularising tunneling; as long as FB lets those using FB Basics and those accessing FB from the full Internet communicate, you can still send information through. It's just like using FB as a proxy. Given that and what I know about Indian ingenuity, I predict a lot more hacks like…
It isn't realistic to think that this will drive any noticeable amount of proxying/tunneling traffic. Not even close to realistic.
Re: Facebook is misleading Indians with its full-page ads about Free Basics
#35I don’t have much to add after the last couple threads on this (my concerns boil down to the importance of net neutrality, and the obscuring way free Facebook plus a few dozen apps is presented as philanthropy) but it’s interesting that after 36 countries, as they say, “embraced” internet.org, India may finally be where Mark Zuckerberg’s ambitions run aground. We have a specific mix of an established tech ecosystem,…
>a Western corporation trying to aggressively meddle in India has an unhappy precedent.
Are you referring to the East India Company as the linked article does? Please be clear, I am not familiar enough with Indian history, and I've seen no-one else bring it up on this page.
Re: Facebook is misleading Indians with its full-page ads about Free Basics
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let us not judge from Intellectual Ivory towers, the facts on the ground are 80% of Indians do not have internet access. You sometimes have to try "impure" methods. The question is still up in the air, whether FB Basics is gateway to full internet or if it is a walled garden. Either way, it is better than No Access. The immediate retort I get is, why not facebook provide free internet access to poor. Guys, is it thei…
> Either way, it is better than No Access. I see this as a false dilemma. Internet access in India is already cheap enough to be near the cost of a phone over its effective lifetime. To quote the linked post: > Given that data packages cost as little as Rs. 20 a month while phones cost Rs. 2,000 and up, we think their thesis itself is flawed So the group that free basics can help to get online are those for whom the…
> India is already cheap enough to be near the cost of a phone
Indians are very frugal, if they bought the phone, then that's the end of it. They won't even spend a single penny to buy the Internet.. Only way is to give it for free and let them experience the usefulness and long term effect.
How to give for free? That's up for debate.
Re: Facebook is misleading Indians with its full-page ads about Free Basics
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let us not judge from Intellectual Ivory towers, the facts on the ground are 80% of Indians do not have internet access. You sometimes have to try "impure" methods. The question is still up in the air, whether FB Basics is gateway to full internet or if it is a walled garden. Either way, it is better than No Access. The immediate retort I get is, why not facebook provide free internet access to poor. Guys, is it thei…
The problem is once you've tried this "impure" method there is no turning back. Once an ISP finds out they can offer some apps free but make other apps count towards data usage, the whole nature of the internet changes. Note that zero-rating is just one aspect of what mobile networks want to do; before the explosive activism in March, they were being more flagrant and trying to charge extra for each WhatsApp message…
>The problem is once you've tried this "impure" method there is no turning back. Once an ISP finds out they can offer some apps free but make other apps count towards data usage, the whole nature of the internet changes.
No it doesn't. There used to be free WhatsApp + Facebook/Twitter access over 3G/GSM here in Brazil for a year or so, NOTHING changed, except the poor could communicate with their friends for free and people spent less. Then came net neutrality* and now people have to pay to STILL only use social networks to communicate, like they did before the free plans and like they'll keep doing. Get a bus here and all you see people doing is chatting via WhatsApp or Messenger, even though they can access whatever they want for the same price.
As some other commenter mentioned, NN crusaders frequently seem like people who can afford data plans and have no contact with reality on a moral crusade about something they have no idea how it would or wouldn't work IRL.
* there are still some plans where you get "free WhatsApp", but you have to pay for the plan itself and the "free Whatsapp" part has something to do with your data cap ending and still being able to use services with low bandwidth.
Re: Facebook is misleading Indians with its full-page ads about Free Basics
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let us not judge from Intellectual Ivory towers, the facts on the ground are 80% of Indians do not have internet access. You sometimes have to try "impure" methods. The question is still up in the air, whether FB Basics is gateway to full internet or if it is a walled garden. Either way, it is better than No Access. The immediate retort I get is, why not facebook provide free internet access to poor. Guys, is it thei…
> Let us not judge from Intellectual Ivory towers, Labeling someone who disagrees with you as being in an "ivory tower" is basically an ad-hominem. Argue the merits, not the source. > the facts on the ground are 80% of Indians do not have internet access. You sometimes have to try "impure" methods. The question is still up in the air, whether FB Basics is gateway to full internet or if it is a walled garden. Either w…
> is basically an ad-hominem. Argue the merits, not the source.
It's not always ad-hominem. It might seem so because of the obvious tone used but at certain times it could just be that the context that a person is coming from could have a really significant impact on his reasoning (for or against).
Re: Facebook is misleading Indians with its full-page ads about Free Basics
#39Even if this is entirely well-intentioned, which is certainly up for debate, it sets a precedent that will eventually see the world's most powerful media corporations become gatekeepers of the internet. The web has been so successful because of any one of us can fire up a text editor and create the next phenomenon without spending a single dollar or seeking anyone's permission. This is not charity, it is a coup d'éta…
Let us not judge from Intellectual Ivory towers, the facts on the ground are 80% of Indians do not have internet access. You sometimes have to try "impure" methods. The question is still up in the air, whether FB Basics is gateway to full internet or if it is a walled garden. Either way, it is better than No Access. The immediate retort I get is, why not facebook provide free internet access to poor. Guys, is it thei…
This is an extremely short-sighted view. There is no question that connectivity is a vital resource necessary for equality and that we want everyone to have access to the internet. The question is how we expand the network to them and — most importantly — who pays for it?
A network paid for by foreign business interests and advertisers is fundamentally different than a network paid for by its users. But even though the foundation is different, they are in many ways substitute goods, meaning the presence of one will inhibit the popularity of the other. By the most basic economic reasoning, Free Basics will hurt the spread of user-funded peer-to-peer networks like the internet, just as distributing free clothing will hurt a local textile industry.
Based on that model, we can also predict the more fundamental difference between the two networks to be in the details w.r.t. privacy interests, not limited access.
Re: Facebook is misleading Indians with its full-page ads about Free Basics
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really? My first encounter with facebook was when I got spammed by a guy I barely knew, along with the rest of his email address book. I've always found the company to be slimy.
The company might be super slimy, but their engineering team has made huge improvements to the modern web / app development and had gifted us with the awesome open source tools. Only because of them I had a positive outlook of the company
So they give away stuff that's effectively irrelevant to their business and that should cause a positive impression? You shouldn't let what might be called a Trojan Horse to change your impression of them.