61–70 of 243 posts
Pretty heavily editorialized headline, not at all in the economists style. Original title: Facebook's “free internet” programme hits a roadblock in India
Doesn't seem that editorialized. The "roadblock" is the feedback from critics, and the Economist's subhead is "Critics argue Mark Zuckerberg’s generosity is a cover for a land-grab".
I'm personally disappointed by the comments in this article and others, specifically from people here in the Western world, that portray the fight by the internet activists as a fight against internet access to the poor. No one would make arguments like that here. Almost everyone rallied behind Net-Neutrality. Why is that it's ok for the poor to give up their liberty because they can get something of value in return?…
Data infrastructure should be controlled by the government only. Why? Well, imagine that every transport company had to support their own road network... Alternatively, imagine that one company controlled the roads, creating effectively a controlled market nested inside a free market.
If you have exclusive state ownership of wired infrastructure like that, consumers have no state-agonistic means to correct if the state themselves starts breaking net neutrality or just simply do not maintain the network to a standard the consumers of it want.
If you were operating in a society where democracy worked flawlessly, it might work, but thats theoretical. We need to acknowledge the realities of the states we are talking about controlling our network infrastructure here, especially in the US. Since you make the comparison to road networks... mine is incredibly bad. And not just in condition or wear, but in scaling to meet needs. I live in central PA where a lot of businesses have migrated shipping and processing facilities, but there is extremely little budget to expand highways to compensate for heavily increased truck traffic. Now its just hell, and if I ever needed to work a commuter job I would instantly move because the traffic is so bad.
I'm not saying private roads could fix that - if residents didn't want to sell land to build roads, the private company would be screwed without recourse - but there should be huge market pressure around my area for highway expansion that is not being met because of dysfunctional bureaucracy in the state government due to many causes. Can you imagine those people having to build and manage a fiber network, and expand it as technology improves, for the next fifty years?
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Doesn't seem that editorialized. The "roadblock" is the feedback from critics, and the Economist's subhead is "Critics argue Mark Zuckerberg’s generosity is a cover for a land-grab".
It's extraordinarily editorialized, because it implies that the author of the article agrees with one quoted source in the article.
Seems fair game to me.
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> Google Fiber is real internet Minus the things their ToS forbids. Only recently they started allowing you to host game servers, for Minecraft, for example. Their Fiber team heavily opposes Net Neutrality, too. Sadly.
As stated, the Google Fiber restrictions seem more like a QoS and bandwidth concern rather than a content concern.
It’s exactly the "Pay 5$ extra for Netflix on Verizon" concept we all complain about, but which everyone somehow accepts here.
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> Google Fiber is real internet Minus the things their ToS forbids. Only recently they started allowing you to host game servers, for Minecraft, for example. Their Fiber team heavily opposes Net Neutrality, too. Sadly.
"Minus the things their ToS forbids. Only recently they started allowing you to host game servers, for Minecraft, for example. " Basically no residential ISP in the US i'm aware of allows server hosting. Certainly no major ones :)
Now, that IPv6 is becoming more popular, and we might be able to provide globally unique IPs for every end device, and that 24/7 connected internet is standard, it should be a thing of 2 or 3 clicks to host a webserver.
It should be a no-op to set up a raspberry pi to serve websites – and it would definitely provide a lot of kids and students the ability to experiment a lot easier.
Remember, Facebook in its early days was hosted from a dorm room at college. Google from a garage.
I like Eben Moglen's and Mishi Choudhary's take on this situation: Faced with the dawning public recognition that this so-called philanthropy is nothing but an attempt to buy the de-anonymised packets of the Indian poor at a bulk rate, breaking their security in the process of destroying their privacy, Facebook has no alternative but to change the subject. http://indianexpress.com/article/blogs/mark-zuckerberg-nobly.…
Basic internet service. Ok. One app constitutes basic internet according to Zuckerborg.
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Personally, I believe Zuckerberg is sincere in wanting to connect everyone in the world with each other. I feel sure he doesn't think of it as a land grab Does anyone recall what Zuckerberg said about the people who "trust him"?
Apparently we shouldn't mention this here because he said it when he was young and likely to say reprehensible things. But, has he ever apologized? I am discontent to watch the world lay power at his feet, and proud of Indians for standing up to him.
Anyone have a link to such a statement?