How India Pierced Facebook’s Free Basics Program (opens in new tab)

The cynic in me (which is all of me) doesn't think it's an accident that it keeps getting portrayed this way. Same with a Bloomberg article the other day.

When this first launched in India a couple months ago, the realization of what was going on really hit me. I was already opposed to it for net neutrality reasons, but in practice the program just rolled out Facebook and a few apps without data charges to everyone, not just the unconnected, which was extra flagrant. I wrote this: https://medium.com/@firasd/facebook-s-internet-org-free-basi...

Also see this: A data-driven argument on why Marc Andreessen is wrong about Free Basics https://medium.com/@sumanthr/a-data-driven-argument-on-why-m...

The reporter in the main linked article couldn't find one person using Free Basics who hadn't been on the internet before.

Ok, we changed "Free Internet" to "Free Basics" in the title above to avoid ambiguity.

How much cabling and how many APs could FB have deployed with the resources spent trying to propagate this program?

If someone gave me free Internet, I'd probably check out their page.

Run: curl -IL https://medium.com/backchannel/how-india-pierced-facebook-s-...

It is because of a "301 Moved Permanently" response code. The URL shows as "medium.com", because thats the URL saved in the HN database. However when you open it, your browser follows the redirect.