181–190 of 262 posts
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As with Bittorrent, the solution may simply be VPNs.
how would that help? the free sites are on a whitelist; vpns simply mean you pay for everything.
2) There are free VPNs out there. I am not sure how trustworthy they are, but people I know have been using them for ages.
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Some access is better than no access but some types of "some access" are better than other types of "some access".
"some access" is demonstrably harmful if it leads to the ultimate curtailment of availability of "full access".
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Right, because the wrong kind of Internet access could kill people.
Not really, no. But you kinda got the idea: the wrong kind of network access could kill the internet. This is the whole net neutrality issue. No net neutrality, no internet.
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Facebook is not doing this for altruistic reasons.
Good. Look at all of the good all of the altruistic foreign aid has done for the poor nations of the world. In case you aren't aware, it hasn't done much good at all, and often does a lot of harm by perpetuating corruption and undermining local markets. Capitalism is the most successful anti-poverty program in history the world. Facebook has found a way to make money by providing connectivity to a billion people. Wha…
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Facebook is not being altruistic here, and there's no such as thing as free. Whenever a merchant offers "free shipping," they're just manipulating the customer and the cost is built in elsewhere. When facebook offers "free internet," whatever benefits it provides, the cost is hidden and built in elsewhere in Facebook's business model. Which means such a free internet that facebook is supposedly altruistically providi…
I'm not sure you read my comment.
Competition is good, but Facebook has the power to completely destroy and monopolize local industries if unchecked (in less developed economies at least).
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Nonsense. Facebook is rich enough and powerful enough to MAKE the choice be full-internet or nothing. They and other powerful entities can provide full internet. It is THEIR fault that the choice is FaceBook or nothing because they want that to be the choice. FaceBook is not some savior here. The ramifications of pushing everyone to FB are also devastating because they would force everyone to get locked in to using F…
I think you are not hearing the point. Given that Facebook is a greedy company (and not a charity), its not going to give away free full internet. So our choice is about allowing, or not allowing, a billion poor people free Facebook access. Its easy for us to say this is no good and it should be stopped because Facebook access is not as good as the full internet. But who are we to deny poor people what little they ca…
Internet is built on principles of neutrality. It is built on public property (airways, land) that government leases to companies on our behalf. Internet is what it is today because of this neutrality principle. It has given rise to so many companies out of nothingness and created so much opportunity for disruption and growth. So any
We do not want to turn Internet into something useless and backwards (like cable/tv networks). That is what Facebook is trying to do here by lobbying the government to change policy. This has to be stopped no question.
Now let's talk about affordability. Government should look into programs that will lower the overall cost of Internet by reforming how they license spectrum.
They can also provide free access to Internet in public places - like public schools, public libraries, train/bus stations, agri markets etc where most information hungry people who cannot afford are already there. They can also encourage large city/town center operators to provide free wifi.
All said, most poor people in India who don't have Internet are in tier-2/3 cities and villages where there is no connectivity at all today. So, it is not a question of affordability but connectivity.
Facebook is being irresponsible and evil in this case and exploiting the situation and not doing anything to help. In contrast, google recently launched a program to provide high-speed Internet free wifi in 400 train stations in India. This is the largest public wifi program in the world that will actually help poor people.
Internet is built on principles of neutrality. It is built on public property (airways, land) that government leases to companies on our behalf. Internet is what it is today because of this neutrality principle. It has given rise to so many companies out of nothingness and created so much opportunity for disruption and growth. So any
We do not want to turn Internet into something useless and backwards (like cable/tv networks). That is what Facebook is trying to do here by lobbying the government to change policy. This has to be stopped no question.
Now let's talk about affordability. Government should look into programs that will lower the overall cost of Internet by reforming how they license spectrum.
They can also provide free access to Internet in public places - like public schools, public libraries, train/bus stations, agri markets etc where most information hungry people who cannot afford are already there. They can also encourage large city/town center operators to provide free wifi.
All said, most poor people in India who don't have Internet are in tier-2/3 cities and villages where there is no connectivity at all today. So, it is not a question of affordability but connectivity.
Facebook is being irresponsible and evil in this case and exploiting the situation and not doing anything to help. In contrast, google recently launched a program to provide high-speed Internet free wifi in 400 train stations in India. This is the largest public wifi program in the world.
http://www.savetheinternet.in - A template for contacting the authorities to show support for net neutrality (speak up against "Free Basics"). Last time, they received over a million e-mails [0], and that did have a positive effect. Let's 10x that. [0] http://bit.ly/1YCxhlv
On the ethics of this, I'd like to know of the engineers/team in the chain of command who is responsible for the "Something went wrong" flag set on savetheinternet.in : http://i.imgur.com/K3JUack.png Clearly this flag was not set on the grounds of pornography/violent matter/malicious link. This flag was instead set on a what is political speech, representing activists from a large swath of a democratic nation. Consid…