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India bans discriminatory pricing based on source/destination/app/content

blog.savetheinternet.in

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Re: India bans discriminatory pricing based on source/destination/app/content

#181
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People who opposed coke were a minority, who weren't taken seriously by their own political representatives. Well then why Coca Cola and IBM were forced to leave the country? George Fernandes was Union minister when he ordered them to leave India. I don't think you can get any more high profile than that.

I don't know where you are getting your information from. I can still buy Pepsi and Coca Cola in India. And I have friends who work for IBM. Coca Cola has been in bad news for other reasons. If you sell a pesticide poisoned drink, you must expect to be held accountable by the law someday.

For someone who is a License Raj apologist, you clearly don't know enough the History.

In 1977 Janata Party under the leadership of Morarji Desai kicked out Coca Cola and IBM (as the high profile companies). Both the companies came back in 1990s. Go do some research before you start defending economic policies.

Re: India bans discriminatory pricing based on source/destination/app/content

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Same place where France's Google, Germany's Amazon is at, they don't need it. Germany and France are 1/10 the population of India or smaller. India is 2x+ USA populations. > China is wasting effort by creating things because they don't wanna use the things rest of the world uses, and the rest of the world doesn't wanna use their things because it would be giving power to a non-liberal democracy. Then of course US c…

> Germany and France are 1/10 the population of India or smaller. India is 2x+ USA populations. All I am saying is that there is no need of creating the same piece of software by a different team of people just because of NIH Syndrome (Not Invented Here). India should spend time in creating other things. China created its own search engine because they want a feature i.e. censorship, which Google doesn't offer them.…

>All I am saying is that there is no need of creating the same piece of software by a different team of people just because of NIH Syndrome (Not Invented Here). India should spend time in creating other things.

It's not just NIH. If you're in the small leagues you get to use whatever other players offer, but if you're one of the superpowers, like China is and India wants to be, it makes sense to have your own infrastructure that you control.

>China created its own search engine because they want a feature i.e. censorship, which Google doesn't offer them.

Not just that. First, there's surveillance of its citizens. China might be OK with doing it to their own citizens, and the US might be OK with them doing it to their own. But neither the US nor China would be OK with the other doing it to their citizens. Now, a second rate player, like Spain or even Germany (who even was under US governance for a long time after WWII) might be OK with it, and an aggregate big player like the EU might not yet have the power of coordination and political might to fight this situation.

Second, most of the western internet (from news outlets to social media) mostly features and touts the western internets and viewpoints on any matter, from cultural issues to trade agreements. I'm not talking of Chinese government propaganda here either (that of course also exists). I'm talking about all kinds of issues, where there are different national interests at stake. Now, this situation is convenient for the US population, who follows its own websites, never watches e.g. Brazilian or French movies or listens to e.g. Spanish or Chinese pop, and sure as hell never reads foreign newspapers or uses foreign social media platforms anyway ("never" here used as a proxy for "in insignificant amounts"), as all of their media/websites put the culture and interests of the US (or of some US based companies) first.

Of course people sharing those interests and culture (e.g. US citizens, British etc), these media/services might even appear "totally neutral" -- as if they're just describing out objective reality. Or they'll point to things like FOX vs X progressive channel, to show how there's variety of opinion as if that covers the whole spectrum.

People outside the US reading those outlets and using those services though (because of them being early technological pioneers, having the infrastructure and the money, etc) do have this problem -- that the majority of stuff there is more often than not against their national interests/culture/sensitivities/political views/etc.

>Indian Facebook doesn't make sense.

A US based web service having access to all the private data for the Indian population makes even less sense. Would Americans feel the same way if Facebook was, say, Russian? Conveniently they seldom, if ever, have to use a non US-based web service of such scope. It's always the others who have to use theirs.

Re: India bans discriminatory pricing based on source/destination/app/content

#183
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been debated to death. There is no evidence to prove this was wrong. People who are this childish to question government policy right after independence should understand prevailing conditions then. India just got free from a colonial power which had sneaked in with trade as a excuse and then ruined pretty much everything for the next 3 centuries. Conditions prevailing, Nehru did what he could. He saw what h…

> India just got free from a colonial power which had sneaked in with trade as a excuse and then ruined pretty much everything for the next 3 centuries. It's funny though West Germany, which was completely ruined by WW2 emerged as a lot more prosperous country than what India did for the first 40 years. Do you have any idea how badly Germany was bombed. If you say things like "But Germany is an exception because X",…

>It's funny though West Germany, which was completely ruined by WW2 emerged as a lot more prosperous country than what India did for the first 40 years. Do you have any idea how badly Germany was bombed. If you say things like "But Germany is an exception because X", then think why East Germany couldn't be as rich. East Germany was about as poor as West Germany after WW2.

Well, West Germany is an exception because it gotten a Cold War ally and darling immediately after the war.

They're also very favorably placed in the center of Europe, and were given lots of help to try to rebuild their economy (their sugar daddy allowing them to pay only minimal war recuperations, cheap migrant hands from Turkey and Greece, etc).

They also didn't have instability of the kind India faced post-colonialism, since the ex British rulers (as is their standard mode of operation everywhere, from Israel/Palestine to Cyprus/Northern Cyprus etc.) used a divide and conquer tactic, playing Indian, Pakistan, Bangladesh etc one against the other.

And of course it's not just the starting state (Germany being bombed, India being poor) but also things like human capital, etc. Germany, post WWII, had far more educated people, industrial experience and infrastructure (as a percentage) compared to India.

As for East Germany, it was depended on USSR which didn't have the same kind of economic resources as the US, nor did other communist countries it mostly traded with.

>All Indians do is give excuses for why India was poor

Yes, those lazy Indians, always up to no good. There are no historical reasons, just lazy, ignorant, people.

/s

Re: India bans discriminatory pricing based on source/destination/app/content

#184
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been debated to death. There is no evidence to prove this was wrong. People who are this childish to question government policy right after independence should understand prevailing conditions then. India just got free from a colonial power which had sneaked in with trade as a excuse and then ruined pretty much everything for the next 3 centuries. Conditions prevailing, Nehru did what he could. He saw what h…

> India just got free from a colonial power which had sneaked in with trade as a excuse and then ruined pretty much everything for the next 3 centuries. It's funny though West Germany, which was completely ruined by WW2 emerged as a lot more prosperous country than what India did for the first 40 years. Do you have any idea how badly Germany was bombed. If you say things like "But Germany is an exception because X",…

> If you say things like "But Germany is an exception because X", then think why East Germany couldn't be as rich. East Germany was about as poor as West Germany after WW2.

West Germany was an exception because the US, primarily, poured vast resources into it as a bulwark against communist expansion, both ideologically and militarily, into Western Europe.

The reasons why that doesn't apply to East Germany are, well, pretty obvious.

> Similarly, Korean split was another one of those examples.

Well, yes, there is a similarity between South Korea and Germany...

Re: India bans discriminatory pricing based on source/destination/app/content

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "What Facebook wants is our less fortunate brothers and sisters should be able to poke each other and play Candy Crush, but not be able to look up a fact on Google, or learn something on Khan Academy or sell their produce on a commodity market or even search for a job," he said. Indians use connectivity very differently than the rest of the world(or at least different from the developed countries). To Indians, phon…

The closed nature of the internet is dangerous for reasons far beyond "mom and pop can't use the rest of the internet anyway" argument: 1. Content Quality reduces due to lack of choice, and lack of exposure: Closed-groups are places where spam, false information, propaganda breed to a high degree. Other parts of internet help verify claims/suspicions/hypothesis. 2. Sets up a monopoly, vendor-lock-in, changes habits:…

But there is already a monopoly. By TRAI over 1.25 billions.

If this discision was taken at state or city level, would be much better. Otherwise citizens/customers lose either way.

Re: India bans discriminatory pricing based on source/destination/app/content

#186
post #86

>Two key aspects of the Net Neutrality consultation that remain: firstly, the proposed requirement for providers of VoIP services like Whatsapp, Viber and Skype to obtain a government licence, which would mean that telecom operators could be required to treat traffic from unlicensed VoIP providers differently from the rest, and secondly, allowing telecom operators the ability to slow down and speed up websites, givin…

India has different set of laws on it. It's not allowed to create slow lanes in the first place. It's also not allowed to provision a broadband speed of lower than 512 kbit which is due to be revised to 1 mbit/2 mbit minimum depending on where you are later this year. Similar minimum speed rules exist for 2G, 3G, and now LTE. This new ban works alongside other laws. Broadband operators must adhere to existing neutral…

You are contradicting what was written on savetheinternet.in. I don't know which is more accurate. FWIW I haven't seen any minimum speed requirement. I've only seen that broadband has a minimum speed. And I've seen ISPs advertise "high speed Internet" to get around it.

Re: India bans discriminatory pricing based on source/destination/app/content

#187
post #162

Great quote on a different article covering the same story: http://money.cnn.com/2016/02/08/technology/india-facebook-fr... ---------- Mahesh Murthy, a prominent Indian venture capitalist, last year described the program as "imperialism and the East India Company all over again," carried out under the guise of "digital equality." "What Facebook wants is our less fortunate brothers and sisters should be able to poke e…

The problem with this sort of nationalism is that it's all talk. No one offers an alternative solution, so the poor continue to be poor. This attitude is what creates trade barriers and protectionist policies, and India won't solve their problems until they can compete with other nations on manufacturing and prices. The reality is that, unless you are able to keep up with modern tooling you're just going to keep fall…

Talk is an important part of progress. Implementing a half-assed solution to such a massive problem will have lasting implications for decades. I realise this goes against the modern hacker groupthink, but in this case requirements analysis is actually an important part of ensuring that billions of people don't get fucked by a US corporation.

Re: India bans discriminatory pricing based on source/destination/app/content

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Germany and France are 1/10 the population of India or smaller. India is 2x+ USA populations. All I am saying is that there is no need of creating the same piece of software by a different team of people just because of NIH Syndrome (Not Invented Here). India should spend time in creating other things. China created its own search engine because they want a feature i.e. censorship, which Google doesn't offer them.…

> All I am saying is that there is no need of creating the same piece of software by a different team of people just because of NIH Syndrome (Not Invented Here). India should spend time in creating other things. It's not just NIH. If you're in the small leagues you get to use whatever other players offer, but if you're one of the superpowers, like China is and India wants to be, it makes sense to have your own infras…

thank you for this reply, really puts things into perspective.

Re: India bans discriminatory pricing based on source/destination/app/content

#189

Probably the most progressive regulation among anywhere in the world. Enforcement of these #NetNeutrality principles is the literal granting of the Liberties and Equalities of opportunities, granted to individuals and as such this is a landmark order that will have far reaching repercussions. Worth noting how this played out. A bunch of folks on the internet, organised themselves and campaigned to stop a $300B market…

> progressive How is it progressive? This is conservative (not wanting change).

Can you consider that the change wound have been (in utilitarian terms) detrimental?

Re: India bans discriminatory pricing based on source/destination/app/content

#190
post #162

Great quote on a different article covering the same story: http://money.cnn.com/2016/02/08/technology/india-facebook-fr... ---------- Mahesh Murthy, a prominent Indian venture capitalist, last year described the program as "imperialism and the East India Company all over again," carried out under the guise of "digital equality." "What Facebook wants is our less fortunate brothers and sisters should be able to poke e…

The problem with this sort of nationalism is that it's all talk. No one offers an alternative solution, so the poor continue to be poor. This attitude is what creates trade barriers and protectionist policies, and India won't solve their problems until they can compete with other nations on manufacturing and prices. The reality is that, unless you are able to keep up with modern tooling you're just going to keep fall…

What a bunch proclamation!
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