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Yes. Internet.org will hand facebook enormous power that would threaten open competition on the public internet, not just on internet.org. Participation on int

Yes. Internet.org will hand facebook enormous power that would threaten open competition on the public internet, not just on internet.org. Participation on internet.org is subject to approval by Facebook and ISPs. They choose the winners on their platform, not end users. Imagine a world where, say, 20% of users are on internet.org. If you're building a consumer service that benefits from network effects, you must be on internet.org or else you will be eaten up by a competitor who is. Facebook, through its veto over internet.org participation, can now play an outsize role in deciding which consumer internet services get traction and which don’t. App developers will divert resources from building features that users want, into building features that gets them perks from Facebook — probably by pushing more and more user data into the “open” graph. This would not just harm internet.org consumers, it will harm every internet user.

briandear 11y ago
The veto power is the part that makes this whole thing dishonest. Claiming non profit status and presumably taking advantage of tax exemptions in order to boost Facebook's core business? Does anyone else see the conflicts there? Essentially Zuckerberg is trying to use the strategy Carlos Slim used in Mexico with mobile phones: be the only game in town for years by making exclusivity deals with the government and by the time the competition is finally able to compete in a free(er) market, Slim has such a head start as to be unstoppable. Except now Zuck is doing this at a billion scale rather than a Mexico scale. I think the Google balloon internet project has far more value than this. Google wants you to use their services, but at least they are interested in the entire internet for the poor and not just Facebook-y type access.
tombrossman 11y ago
Remember that for some users Facebook effectively is the Internet. They have a normal broadband connection in a relatively affluent western country but spend much of their time online using Facebook for browsing and two-way communication with other Facebook users. On a regular basis I'll hear someone mention 'their website' and when I ask for the URL it is clear from their reply that what they mean is they have a Facebook page for their group/business/whatever. When I press further they seem to understand the concept that owning a domain name and having a 'website' on Facebook are not exactly the same. These are normal users, not stupid people, and this is how perceive things right now. This is anecdotal and I don't have any peer-reviewed studies to cite but I suspect this is pretty common and I wonder if others are seeing the same thing?
- jfim 11y ago
  Sure, some people may spend most of their time on Facebook, but it doesn't mean it is all of their time. The same people who spend most of their time on Facebook would probably be very annoyed if all of a sudden their online banking would need to be done through Facebook with a Facebook-approved bank, or if they couldn't book airplane tickets on a third-party site or check the weather and so on. That's the problem with internet.org; it's not that people wouldn't spend most of their time on Facebook, but it's that it makes it harder for non-Facebook entities to get access to these users, essentially building a Facebook-branded moat. For example, say that building an ISP to reach these users has a fixed cost of x. This means that if that ISP has n users, the costs of building that ISP are spread out amongst those n users (ie. x/n); however, with internet.org, this would lower the demand for this ISP (because n will be smaller, due to some people not interested in having anything else but Facebook) and because the price of getting actual internet will be higher. It's definitely a good move for Facebook, but creates large negative externalities for other people. A better move overall (but less so for Facebook), would be to give free access to the actual internet but let them access Facebook on its own merits. If Facebook offers such value to these users (and it definitely does for a lot of people), then there is no need to wall these users off of the rest of the internet. Edit: formatting.

briandear 11y ago

The veto power is the part that makes this whole thing dishonest. Claiming non profit status and presumably taking advantage of tax exemptions in order to boost Facebook's core business? Does anyone else see the conflicts there? Essentially Zuckerberg is trying to use the strategy Carlos Slim used in Mexico with mobile phones: be the only game in town for years by making exclusivity deals with the government and by the time the competition is finally able to compete in a free(er) market, Slim has such a head start as to be unstoppable. Except now Zuck is doing this at a billion scale rather than a Mexico scale. I think the Google balloon internet project has far more value than this. Google wants you to use their services, but at least they are interested in the entire internet for the poor and not just Facebook-y type access.

tombrossman 11y ago

Remember that for some users Facebook effectively is the Internet. They have a normal broadband connection in a relatively affluent western country but spend much of their time online using Facebook for browsing and two-way communication with other Facebook users. On a regular basis I'll hear someone mention 'their website' and when I ask for the URL it is clear from their reply that what they mean is they have a Facebook page for their group/business/whatever. When I press further they seem to understand the concept that owning a domain name and having a 'website' on Facebook are not exactly the same. These are normal users, not stupid people, and this is how perceive things right now. This is anecdotal and I don't have any peer-reviewed studies to cite but I suspect this is pretty common and I wonder if others are seeing the same thing?

jfim 11y ago
Sure, some people may spend most of their time on Facebook, but it doesn't mean it is all of their time. The same people who spend most of their time on Facebook would probably be very annoyed if all of a sudden their online banking would need to be done through Facebook with a Facebook-approved bank, or if they couldn't book airplane tickets on a third-party site or check the weather and so on. That's the problem with internet.org; it's not that people wouldn't spend most of their time on Facebook, but it's that it makes it harder for non-Facebook entities to get access to these users, essentially building a Facebook-branded moat. For example, say that building an ISP to reach these users has a fixed cost of x. This means that if that ISP has n users, the costs of building that ISP are spread out amongst those n users (ie. x/n); however, with internet.org, this would lower the demand for this ISP (because n will be smaller, due to some people not interested in having anything else but Facebook) and because the price of getting actual internet will be higher. It's definitely a good move for Facebook, but creates large negative externalities for other people. A better move overall (but less so for Facebook), would be to give free access to the actual internet but let them access Facebook on its own merits. If Facebook offers such value to these users (and it definitely does for a lot of people), then there is no need to wall these users off of the rest of the internet. Edit: formatting.