However, I believe he is also sincere in thinking that Facebook is the best and perhaps only platform by which this is possible. In this he is sincerely mistaken.
I feel sure he doesn't think of it as a land grab, even privately. But he is looking from the inside out. If he wants to be seen as the Great Connector, he needs to be pouring money into local infrastructure, subsidizing open source routing software, lobbying worldwide against entrenched bureaucracy and corporate obstructionism. They're doing some of that, sure, but Free Basics is heavy handed and no one trusts Facebook to begin with - it's not strange to think of it as a sort of modern digital imperialist.
I haven't heard stories like this about Facebook, but perhaps they're better at covering their tracks.
Time to detach.
If I were you, I'd question the intentions too. The arguments have been laid out against "Free Basics" but Facebook has refused to engage the community. It continues to push its agenda forward by running dubious ad-campaigns and surveys.
This is the second time Facebook has tried something similar, after having lost the first round of battle that led to many Indians uninstalling apps and boycotting websites that supported/participated in its "internet.org" initiative.
Zuckerberg has managed to PR himself as sincere, honest, noble, altruist and what not... but that PR hasn't worked in India. He, personally, holds no sway unlike, may be, in SV.
"Free Basics" let's not kid ourselves is a move by Facebook to take control of the Internet. It already controls 4 of the most popular apps on mobile in the English speaking world (Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger); with "Free Basics" they're taking steps to ensure that dominance stays intact.
You even see Google trying to do that in a more subtle way... googleweblight, subsidized Nexus line of products, "free and open source" Android with tightly controlled ecosystem, Chrome with properiteary plug-ins, Fiber, Fi, and OnHub to quote a few.
It is not just that. The worrying thing is that they are violating net neutrality by making sure that "FB and friends" is the only thing accessible on this free internet. If Mr. Zuckerberg is that altruistic, why not provide proper full internet? Even a limited (say 500MB per person/month) internet for free is better than nothing.
But no, they want to violate net neutrality by disallowing everyone else. They don't want to provide HTTPS security, but again snoop around their user's data so monies could be made out of that. Is this altruism, Mr. Zuckerberg?
It's much more likely that Zuckerberg realizes his company is overvalued, and that he needs to acquire a massive amount of users to make up for that gap.
Subsidizing a walled-garden version of the Internet where users can only use Facebook in developing countries makes strategic sense for the company.
Facebook doesn't care about "free internet", they care about building their business, and this "free basics" program makes that patently obvious. I don't blame them or necessarily think it's a bad thing , but the propaganda associated with it is ridiculous.
And these are the people whom Zuckerberg is targeting for the FreeBasics free internet program. Maybe, he thinks that socializing on FB or performing a quick google search on farming methods is going to help them, but that is far from reality and just fascinating thinking. All I know is that the millions that Mr. ZUckerberg spent on displaying FreeBasics ads in the Indian newspapers and TV channels would have been much better spent by actually donating that money to the farmers he intends to help.
Agreed. Given what we know about his history, he also seems to think that most people just aren't nearly as smart as he is... and so it's best not to confuse them, with you know, choices. And that the fact that everything they say and do within his realm is relentlessly indexed, analyzed (with literally the most advanced AI techniques money can buy), gleefully pimped out to advertisers -- and at the request of authoritarian governments, outright blocked -- is on balance, all in their best interest.
It's tragic that this is a mistake we see again and again in tech, even with the presence of anti-authority/countercultural tendencies and groups in this field.
Doesn't mean they weren't both right though.
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"?
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.
> Personally, I believe Zuckerberg is sincere in wanting to connect everyone in the world with each other.
I personally think you're a lobbyist or you just like Mark (I mean who wouldn't, eccentric billionaire who gave MOST of his fortune away to a good cause. How could he possibly want to make MORE money)
> But he is looking from the inside out.
Yeah, EXACTLY, ask US (poor people) what we want! --- WE want our Mellenia to use snapchat (with the effects & everything), Netflix & Chill...oh my bad, I lost my train of thought. What I wanted to say was that, WE want you people (first world) to donate to UNICEF so the starving child with a fly on his eye can eat --- that was my outside-in view.
Edit: to all the poor Indians who fought against "free basics", my upmost respect & gratitude --- I hope someday we can all Netflix & Chill instead of just pocking ;)
Or, is he desperately trying to save his company by getting the last remaining drops of users in a rapidly diminishing market for new user base?
If you think about it, Facebook is not a monopoly that it used to be in the early 2000s, even comparing it Microsoft Windows (like someone did in this thread) is an erroneous exercise.
Windows had a kind of monopoly on PC world that perhaps no other software product in the history of computing ever had. But Facebook has tonnes of alternatives. There weren't many when it began, but today we have Google-plus, twitter, Reddit, Hacker-news and lots of others. Granted that none of them is an exact replacement for FB, but then again, everything has its pros and cons, its a monopolistic competition anyways where each product in a competitive market is a monopoloy in itself.
That's not the real threat to Facebook's empire. Those are all tools used by people in their late 20s and 30s who came of age in a desktop-first world and Facebook is comfortable coexisting with them.
The thing that is a threat to Facebook long term is mobie apps like Snapchat, YikYak and other things we old farts haven't even heard of. They are used by (and represent) a new generation of truly mobile-first users for whom Facebook is something their parents ("old people") use. The biggest risk Facebook has with these users is not that it just unused, but uncool.
>I feel sure he doesn't think of it as a land grab, even privately.
why?
I believe most humans are inherently not evil even if they don't agree with me. They want to make the world a better place, and they are simply pursuing an agenda that accomplishes that in their eyes.
I don't have any evidence that most people aren't evil, but in my day to day interactions I have yet to meet someone who I believe is sincerely evil. I'm sure they're out there, I just have faith that there's a lot more of the rest of us.
Should you fault someone for being the change they want to see in the world? (For the record I'm opposed to Free Basics)
If he was sincere, he would have been truthful rather than using every kind of fallacy from https://signposts02.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/logical-fall....
The only way we'd have universal untiered internet is if there was some sort of government fee / tax that you just had to pay to get internet and that was your only option.
Everyone has vastly different (tiered) internet experiences, for example the internet on my phone is faster than the internet on my desktop when uploading.
On my phone I pay for additional data use on my desktop I don't.
Every decision must be evaluated based on its long term trajectory. For example, giving a benevolent government unchecked powers will actually produce short term efficiency gains. But given infinite time, and the fact that it only takes one Hitler to fuck things up completely, it reasons that giving a government unchecked powers will inevitably lead to that scenario.
In Zuckerberg's case, regardless of his motivations, his plan will most likely have short term benefits. It's unfortunate because that's a great selling point. Unfortunately the net neutrality precedent it sets for the long term is bad, and just like Nazi America with a government with unchecked powers, letting Facebook do this is equivalent to giving them a monopoly because such an action will inevitably converge in abuse at some point in the future by integrating over the individual benevolent actions over an infinite amount of time.
> However, I believe he is also sincere in thinking that Facebook is the best and perhaps only platform by which this is possible. In this he is sincerely mistaken.
Why not just give people free bundles of data and let them gravitate towards Facebook how we do in ie: North America?
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.
Basic internet service. Ok. One app constitutes basic internet according to Zuckerborg.
This part is my favorite. I know that my personal website is ineligible because it contains some JavaScript code that handles the navigation, but I submitted it regardlessly just to see how complicated the process is (and to write a blog post about my experience so that others would know what to expect).
That was like 20 days ago. I'm still waiting for someone from Facebook to contact me.
1. It's not really internet. It's a set of 100 sites that includes a real estate portal and a personal blog. If you are talking about connecting the unconnected with essential services, why have these on your list? On the other hand, chennairains.org, a website that helped people during extreme floods in chennai was not on that list.
2. There is no proof that "free basics" actually improves internet connectivity. In fact, Facebook's telecom partner (Reliance Comm) advertises it as a way to save money for surfing on facebook and whatsapp.
3. None of the traffic must be encrypted
4. All traffic flows through facebook's servers
5. It's not an open platform. Facebook and Telcos reserve the right to accept or deny websites on "Free Basics"
The above points make it clear that "free internet" is a facade and it's more of a walled garden that makes facebook the gatekeeper. Another Telco launched something similar a few months ago and was scrapped because it violated net neutrality.
Arguments that "free basics" is required for internet to grow in India are ridiculous. India added _52 Million_ internet users in the first six months of 2015 (http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2015-09-03/news...)
Further "Free basics" has been launched in other countries. But there is not proof that it results in more internet connectivity. (http://www.business-standard.com/article/economy-policy/ther...)
1. what about farmer details. If you want to personalise info for farmers, you will need to register them and capture info. W/o encryption, fb has access to it and is likely to sell it to advertisers.
2. The argument that "Free basics" is essential for farmer is wrong. Reuters has a paid product for farmers (http://www.rmlglobal.com/) and is used by over 1.4 Million farmers in India.
I understand not liking Facebook’s motives, that’s fine. Perhaps we can defer to the preferences of users here, who can choose to accept those motives or not, and to decide if the trade-off is an acceptable one. If we believe that they are unqualified to make this choice, one should explain that position.
Instead, the critics are imposing their preference on the users here, who are poor and (in this article) unheard. Can we please see an article where such people are quoted, and perhaps some numbers about usage, revealing their empirical preferences?
Here am I, a German who used to use Facebook Zero (free access to Facebook via 3G) while I was in middle (and later high) school.
As soon as it became available, I – and some of my friends – stopped using SchuelerVZ, the social network most people used to use at the time – and instead actually tried to convince others to switch to Facebook, too.
"It’s free! You don’t need to pay anything!"
We tried to get as much content as possible inside the network, and never actually left it – because we had literally no money on our prepaid SIMs, and therefore couldn’t access other pages. Everything that wasn’t on Facebook didn’t exist for us.
In only a few months after Facebook Zero launched, the user numbers of SchuelerVZ and StudiVZ rapidly declined.
Today, we don’t have a choice for social networks anymore, Facebook has a monopoly.
----------------
Their realistic option set is: (a) free access to an incredibly valuable set of resources, or (b) nothing.
I would take (a) over (b) any day. I would hope that broader alternatives would eventually come along (and history tells us it will), but the crowd that wants the Indian poor to have nothing until that day comes is, in my opinion, despicable. Heck, I might not even mind some gated internet in the US if I was free to opt-in/out of it and it reduced my internet costs.
1999 called and wants it's keywords back...
If they haven't even heard of it then it doesn't sound like its a viable alternative does it?
The alternative would be to ignore the activists and see if people like a free thing they have minimal understanding of. I think that they will, at least we both suspect they will. But I don't think this will make it right. That they will like the free thing does not make it good for the community. For instance, how many people would like free cigarettes or alcohol after their first few exposures? Many. Would their distribution be good for the community in the long run? No. But who would speak up? It won't be the uninitiated, and it won't be the company distributing the goods.
The less charitable explanation is that they're fighting to keep their leg up on the less fortunate population. The gap between those with Internet access and without is absolutely enormous. If everyone has Internet access, this untaps incredible amount of people resources, which would drive down the demand for those who currently have Internet access. These "activists" have a lot to lose if the poor get allowed into the cool kids' treehouse.
Do you want free facebook? Many people would say yes.
"Free Basics by Facebook provides free access to basic internet services to a billion people all over the world. Your service can be part of it. "
The fb site makes it "free access to basic internet" which it is not. It's free access to facebook. Just say that, and maybe you won't get all the push back.
It's not the critics who made this distinction or picked this fight. It's Zuckerborg.
If you really want to offer free basic internet, then do that. I am sure fb could if it wanted to offer a limited amount of bandwidth to any user who wants it for free to do with as they choose. Then they might actually be doing something positive for the poor of India, rather than trying to corral them into fb in the name of free basic internet.
When looking at the two camps here, you seriously believe the motives of Facebook and Telecom companies that have clear business interest in having users locked up in their walled gardens but doubt the intentions of a motley group of activists including startup founders, university professors, policy experts among others who do not have any direct incentive to oppose people coming on to internet and also do not control that access in anyway?
You appear to believe that the motivations of the Internet-literate about the consequences of Facebook's programme are more nefarious than the motivations of Facebook itself, which is contractually bound to operate in the interests of its shareholders.
Going back in history, there were plenty of woman during the suffrage who stood up and proclaimed they should not be given the vote. Further back, there were plenty of abused wives who proclaimed they should not be allowed to divorce their husbands. Further back, there were plenty of slaves who proclaimed they should not be given freedom.
Now we have a class of highly exploited individuals and an organization that wants to give "internet" access to these individuals but only if their personal data can always be exploited over that highly manicured network. The government cannot shirk its duty to protect these individuals. They will need to monitor "Free Basics" for abuse. The service will not be free from the public perspective and their are better things the government could do for those people.
In this case, choosing how to access the Internet.
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?
And for the same reason, the companies vs government dichotomy is invalid here as well. Even if we want to provide a public service to avoid private monopolization, there's absolutely no reason to forbid private companies from competing with it.
After all, if the problem is that private companies are greedy, a public ISP funded only by their customers' fees and without profit-seeking shareholders should solve the problem within a system of fair competition.
But there is the other side of the equation that matters too. If you have complete government control there is no more market pressure on innovation at all. Nobody would have a reason to develop faster consumer fiber systems since there is no money to be made.
That's what the Chinese government thinks too.
Ideally, the government should stay as far away from the Internet as possible. The conflict of interest is too damn high.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestlé_boycott#Baby_milk_issue
'Facebook addiction' isn't as objectively proven as the side effects mentioned in the article. 'Tracking usage data and privacy snooping' isn't as harmful as the side effects mentioned, because poor people probably value their 'usage data' less and access to basic resources like Wikipedia/job posting sites/health and weather reports more. (and its just fear and speculation that facebook will maliciously track all data passing through its servers, but we are treating it like inevitable fact)
Given how there is no alternative, it is pretty much facebook or nothing.
The easy way to do this for ANY government would be to force all wireless carriers to provide 200 MB free internet to all citizens in exchange for license to broadcast.
This happened once in Poland for example when government provided frequencies in exchange of forcing the company to provide unlimited, but slow internet to all citizens through mobiles.
India has 80% adults with no access to Interwebs, how are you going to solve this problem in next 5 years?
*Do not tell me INR 20 dataplan, I know its there and I would not wish it on my worst enemy.
When deep space exploration ramps up, it'll be the corporations that
name everything, the IBM Stellar Sphere, the Microsoft Galaxy,
Planet Starbucks.
"Facebook has been urging users to sign a petition that claims that “a small, vocal group of critics… demand that people pay equally to access all Internet services, even if that means one billion people can’t afford to access any services,” and that “unless you take action now, India could lose access to free basic Internet services, delaying progress towards digital equality for all Indians."
Facebook has resorted to slander when they can't give transparent answers to the issues raised against Free Basics.
Quote Source : https://www.accessnow.org/open-letter-to-mark-zuckerberg-on-...
Free internet program from the late 90's: "1000 hours free! Sign on today!" :)
Google Fiber is real internet; 'free internet basics' are an attempt to turn the internet into a walled garden.
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.
How does that even work? Why would the telecoms agree to pay the bill on behalf of Facebook? Surely there must be some money from Facebook back to the telecom, to make it worthwhile for them.
Edit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Zero
http://telecoms.com/opinion/0-facebook-com-means-zero-money-...
Sadly, all the campaigns are focused on Facebook/Zuckerberg and people calling for a ban on Free Basics when they should actually be campaigning against zero-rating.
Free Basics might be a great gateway drug to the internet, but what good is it if the internet as we know today will not exist when the poor decide to get a "complete" internet connection?
Zuckerberg plans to move the internet back to the dark ages.
Also the cost of providing the service is on the ISP/carrier that FB ties up with.
The key factor that is glossed over is:
> Though the programme is promoted by Facebook, its costs are borne by the mobile-telecoms operators.
I was all for facebook basics when I thought Facebook was paying for poor people to access at least some restricted internet access. But its actually the operators that are paying for this. Giving away free access to some sites in a walled garden, hoping those same users will pay to access other sites at some points.
So Facebook is just a beneficiary in all of this. Getting new users at no cost. Taking the credit for it, while operators are actually paying the bills.
With bare minimum exposure to the ideas via Free Basics, people will be able to imagine what else is out there. It becomes "Google is like when you type words into the search box on facebook, except you get more results and they're more relevant." I would imagine that once exposed to even a limited version of the internet, people will quickly demand unrestricted access from their local government. But they have to know what they don't have before they can ask for it.
If this is all an Evil Plan by Mark Zuckerberg to set up an internet monopoly in India, then it's a very stupid plan. Facebook is a communication platform. People will use it to communicate with people who have normal internet, and will no doubt hear about all the things that they don't have access to. It's only a matter of time before "Free Basics" becomes "Low Cost Government Internet Access For All".
For many people from my generation, AOL was the internet. It was all we knew. But eventually we figured out that there was more out there, and the people of India are capable of doing that as well. There are hackers in every culture, at every social strata. If you give them an inch, they'll turn it into a mile or more. Free Basics isn't perfect, but for many people it's better than nothing.
And that's precisely the problem. Most advocates for Net Neutrality are afraid of exactly this: the death of the free and open internet for those who can't afford it, replaced by some fragmented collection of services offered in a bundle package like some Cable Television plan.
It's much better they eat cake, than this "free internet"
Make an ally out of gravity and you can use its strength for something half-decent instead of all-bad.
I think this land grab by Facebook is half-decent instead of all-bad. Facebook is treating the poor better than the Indian government has, at least. Neither institution really gives a fuck about them.
Facebook's “free internet” programme hits a roadblock in India
The subtitle ("Critics argue") would have been ok, but is less informative, and there's nothing wrong with the article's main headline, so we've put that in above.
I heard about some more, but didn't bookmark them :<
I'm fairly sure that FB has things in place to stop you from using bots to send messages though, in an attempt to stop spam.
Facebook's “free internet” programme hits a roadblock in India