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Internet.org will finish internet the way we know it, hurt India’s growth

sunday-guardian.com

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Re: Internet.org will finish internet the way we know it, hurt India’s growth

#41

Post by pmontra »

Harimwakairi wrote: post #17
mattxxx wrote: post #11

This article is phrased very awkwardly. It reads like giving away free access to certain sites, is the same as making premium internet access. Am I missing something? Facebook hate aside, this is a change meant to give something away . Right?

Ask Netscape how they feel about Microsoft giving Internet Explorer away.

Netscape wa giving its browser away for free too. I remember I was downloading it from netscape.com without paying. What made Microsoft subject to an antitrust investigation was bundling IE with Windows. MS lost the case but too late for Netscape.

To answer another reply to your post, that's also the difference with Linus distributing Linux for free. No bundling. Furthermore there is the open source vs closed source issue which is no small difference too.

Re: Internet.org will finish internet the way we know it, hurt India’s growth

#42

Post by pmontra »

adventured wrote: post #36
gojomo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're swayed by that logic, should perhaps Google be forced to charge users for web search, and Android, and their other "free" offerings that put smaller competitors at a disadvantage?

You won't get a response to that, for the same reason you won't get a response to: should all Linux vendors be forced to charge prices comparable to Windows, because otherwise they're dumping? And of course OpenOffice should be made illegal under that same logic.

They also give you the source code. That makes the whole issue so different that I won't use Linux and OO as an analogy for this Indian case.

Re: Internet.org will finish internet the way we know it, hurt India’s growth

#43

Post by simonh »

dreamdu5t wrote: post #5

What's wrong with this? They're not preventing you from paying for Internet access, they're offering some access for free. People in India are free to start competing ISPs.

You're couching your defence of this in free market terms, but the truth is that for customers of this ISP these web sites no longer exist in a free market for Internet services. They have managed to skew the market in their favour by artificially lowering the overall cost of using their services and artificially raising the cost of connecting to competing services. You can't have your free market cake on one end of the argument and eat it on the other. Either you're in favour of free markets at both ends, or you aren't.

Yes there is a market for ISP access and consumers are free to chose another. That's fair. Nobody is arguing this is illegal, it not even necessarily immoral for the people that made the deal. It's just business and companies give away freebies all the time for all sorts of reasons. The problem comes if this becomes standard practice, because at that point you don't have an open market anymore, you have an industry cartel that has stitched up the market to divide it up between themselves. See Adam Smith for why this is bad and why, in order to operate equitably and in the public interest, markets need to be regulated in order to remain free.

Re: Internet.org will finish internet the way we know it, hurt India’s growth

#44

Post by dreamdu5t »

nitrogen wrote: post #10
dreamdu5t wrote: post #5

What's wrong with this? They're not preventing you from paying for Internet access, they're offering some access for free. People in India are free to start competing ISPs.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_%28pricing_policy%29 for one example of how giving something away for free can be net worse for the economy/world than charging a fair price for it. Another issue is what is given for free. If free access is given to something that is 80% of what they need, people will have reduced incentive to buy 100%, shrinking the market for the 100% solution, raising its price, and keepi…

"net worse" by what measure? How is a "fair" price determined, and by whom?

Re: Internet.org will finish internet the way we know it, hurt India’s growth

#45

Post by avemuri »

pmontra wrote: post #41
Harimwakairi wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ask Netscape how they feel about Microsoft giving Internet Explorer away.

Netscape wa giving its browser away for free too. I remember I was downloading it from netscape.com without paying. What made Microsoft subject to an antitrust investigation was bundling IE with Windows. MS lost the case but too late for Netscape. To answer another reply to your post, that's also the difference with Linus distributing Linux for free. No bundling. Furthermore there is the open source vs closed source…

They made it free in response to Microsoft and refocused on monetizing servers.

Re: Internet.org will finish internet the way we know it, hurt India’s growth

#46

Post by x0x0 »

thawkins wrote: post #22
eklavya wrote: post #18

Maybe I misunderstood. But I think the alarm bells are pre-mature. You HAVE to pay for internet access, what this announcements says is that if you visit some websites you will not be charged. How is it any bad? The websites are paying the telecom company to bear the cost of the traffic. The customer, like always, is bearing the cost of traffic to internet.

If you are a startup trying to compete with any of those 38 sites, thrn you start with a massive disadvantage. Zuckerberg is essentialy creating a massive walled garden where the walls are held in place by economic pressure.

but are people better off or worse? Should fb be forced to subsidize access to competitors?

Does India have an effective internet access monopoly (occasionally a duopoly) ala the us, which is why I supported fcc regulations?

Re: Internet.org will finish internet the way we know it, hurt India’s growth

#47

Post by simonh »

gojomo wrote: post #26
nitrogen wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_%28pricing_policy%29 for one example of how giving something away for free can be net worse for the economy/world than charging a fair price for it. Another issue is what is given for free. If free access is given to something that is 80% of what they need, people will have reduced incentive to buy 100%, shrinking the market for the 100% solution, raising its price, and keepi…

If you're swayed by that logic, should perhaps Google be forced to charge users for web search, and Android, and their other "free" offerings that put smaller competitors at a disadvantage?

Google being add supported doesn't directly raise the cost of competing services. Conversely Facebook making a deal to make accessing itse service free on a paid network has the direct consequence of making the cost of using competing services go up. The cost of free access to Facebook has to be borne by somebody, if not the ISP then the customer has to pay it when they acess non-subsidised sites.

Internet.org is not about giving things away for free, it's about a cartel using their combined market power to negotiate subsidies and fix prices in order to distort the market.

Re: Internet.org will finish internet the way we know it, hurt India’s growth

#48

Post by eklavya »

thawkins wrote: post #22
eklavya wrote: post #18

Maybe I misunderstood. But I think the alarm bells are pre-mature. You HAVE to pay for internet access, what this announcements says is that if you visit some websites you will not be charged. How is it any bad? The websites are paying the telecom company to bear the cost of the traffic. The customer, like always, is bearing the cost of traffic to internet.

If you are a startup trying to compete with any of those 38 sites, thrn you start with a massive disadvantage. Zuckerberg is essentialy creating a massive walled garden where the walls are held in place by economic pressure.

It's not like people will stop getting an internet connection. They will still have it. They will open other websites as well. The traffic from a particular website is not significant anyway so I don't think they will go to/prefer websites with free access only. Facebook right now has no competition, they would have used it anyway and it something better comes along people won't care about the few MBs/month it costs them.

ISPs have already been giving free WhatsApp plans and all, nothing changed for telegram et al I suppose.

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