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Facebook is misleading Indians with its full-page ads about Free Basics

804 points by temp 11y ago

ZoF 11y ago
For those of us without a linkedin/facebook: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/facebook-misleading-indians-its-full-page-ads-free-basics-murthy http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...
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gamekathu 11y ago
finally more people are speaking about it. its sad to see facebook revert to cheap publicity stunt tactics to get their way around. I always had a good impression of FB specially for their open source tools which I use a lot, and I really hope they can put this murky event behind them and go back to the way they were. n.b : link to the full page ads : http://imgur.com/a/hb3nt http://imgur.com/a/hb3nt
- logingone 11y ago
  Really? My first encounter with facebook was when I got spammed by a guy I barely knew, along with the rest of his email address book. I've always found the company to be slimy.
  - gamekathu 11y ago
    The company might be super slimy, but their engineering team has made huge improvements to the modern web / app development and had gifted us with the awesome open source tools. Only because of them I had a positive outlook of the company
    - ino 11y ago
      If you write apps for their ecosystem, you've been fucked real, but real hard at least 6 times in the last 6 years. From unkept promises to everchanging rules, terms and api.
      - rckclmbr 11y ago
        So you dont use react, flow, presto, hhvm, buck, jest, etc.... ?
    - MichaelGG 11y ago
      So they give away stuff that's effectively irrelevant to their business and that should cause a positive impression? You shouldn't let what might be called a Trojan Horse to change your impression of them.
ghughes 11y ago
Even if this is entirely well-intentioned, which is certainly up for debate, it sets a precedent that will eventually see the world's most powerful media corporations become gatekeepers of the internet. The web has been so successful because of any one of us can fire up a text editor and create the next phenomenon without spending a single dollar or seeking anyone's permission. This is not charity, it is a coup d'état.
- sremani 11y ago
  Let us not judge from Intellectual Ivory towers, the facts on the ground are 80% of Indians do not have internet access. You sometimes have to try "impure" methods. The question is still up in the air, whether FB Basics is gateway to full internet or if it is a walled garden. Either way, it is better than No Access. The immediate retort I get is, why not facebook provide free internet access to poor. Guys, is it their responsibility to give internet connection without any thing in return? How about asking that to your IAS uncle? or Politician neighbor. The Net Neutrality activists of India, are bunch of middle class disconnected from poor activists. They think their idealogical purity is paramount than a dirty limited connection for the poor. I am afraid populism will one more time win the day, while NN activists take a victory lap, the India's poor now will not have any form of connectivity.
  - firasd 11y ago
    The problem is once you've tried this "impure" method there is no turning back. Once an ISP finds out they can offer some apps free but make other apps count towards data usage, the whole nature of the internet changes. Note that zero-rating is just one aspect of what mobile networks want to do; before the explosive activism in March, they were being more flagrant and trying to charge extra for each WhatsApp message or add extra charges for Skype calls.
    - sremani 11y ago
      Isn't that happening on T-Mobile as we speak in US, and yet people are moving in droves cutting their broadband to mobile Internet. I am for Net Neutrality in general, course correction is and has been always a part of regulation and I acknowledge it is slow, but let it play out.
firasd 11y ago
I don’t have much to add after the last couple threads on this (my concerns boil down to the importance of net neutrality, and the obscuring way free Facebook plus a few dozen apps is presented as philanthropy) but it’s interesting that after 36 countries, as they say, “embraced” internet.org, India may finally be where Mark Zuckerberg’s ambitions run aground. We have a specific mix of an established tech ecosystem, educated middle class, and active (though imperfect) democracy, all of which combined to spark a grassroots movement for net neutrality. I hope we can resist Facebook’s lobbying, whether visible marketing like this or backroom deals with telecom networks and governments. P.S. Not to mention the aspect I’ve seen many people bring up: a Western corporation trying to aggressively meddle in India has an unhappy precedent.
- gpvos 11y ago
  >a Western corporation trying to aggressively meddle in India has an unhappy precedent. Are you referring to the East India Company as the linked article does? Please be clear, I am not familiar enough with Indian history, and I've seen no-one else bring it up on this page.
  - firasd 11y ago
    Yeah, I see people reference colonialism in general as well as the EIC in particular.
    - gpvos 11y ago
      Okay, I was just curious if you meant something more recent that I was not aware of. (Not that the colonial era wasn't bad enough, mind you.)
  - chimeracoder 11y ago
    > the East India Company Companies. There were several - British, Swedish French, Dutch, Portuguese, you name it. The British ended up taking the rest over, but practically every European colonial power had their own East India Company at one point or another (or tried to) and they all competed on how best to exploit the resources they could extract from India.
mtgx 11y ago
Over the next few years, someone should also look into how much of that "philanthropy" money is going into Internet.org from Zuckerberg - mainly because I'd hate for him to get away with most people believing he's giving away his fortune for the good of mankind, when in fact he'd just be propping up Facebook, but with fewer taxes on his money.
- propogandist 11y ago
  there was no mention of philanthropy, it was PR stunt. All Zuckerburg did was move his wealth to a private LLC, it's the degenerate media and press that interpreted it as "philanthropy", probably to get some Likes on their FB post.
  - soared 11y ago
    Besides his entire letter saying it was being given to charity you mean?
    - propogandist 11y ago
      show me that letter you may want to revist it https://blogs.harvard.edu/philg/2015/12/03/is-the-new-zuckerberg-fake-charity-an-estate-tax-avoidance-scheme/ https://blogs.harvard.edu/philg/2015/12/03/is-the-new-zucker...
- jsprogrammer 11y ago
  His 'fortune' is primarily a claim on future FB revenue. It can be wiped out at any time.
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chdir 11y ago
http://www.savetheinternet.in http://www.savetheinternet.in - A template for contacting the authorities to show support for net neutrality (speak up against "Free Basics"). Last time, they received over a million e-mails [0], and that did have a positive effect. Let's 10x that. [0] http://bit.ly/1YCxhlv http://bit.ly/1YCxhlv
- vickychijwani 11y ago
  Facebook is doing its best to stop people from accessing this as well -- if I click a link to that website from Facebook, I get a message that seems designed to stop me from going ahead. It says, "Something Went Wrong. Sorry, there was a problem with this link: http://www.SaveTheInternet.in/ http://www.SaveTheInternet.in/ You can now continue to this website, or go back to the page you were on before. Remember, only follow links from sources you trust."
- chdir 11y ago
  A pseudo-live count of e-mails sent to TRAI in support of #NetNeutrality https://twitter.com/bulletinbabu https://twitter.com/bulletinbabu
stcredzero 11y ago
Okay, if an activist can contemplate a program giving everyone in India who wants it 500MB a month mobile bandwidth, then I have to call out western web app developers for committing a heinous crimes against global Internet access equality. It used to be that I could get by with a 500MB plan on my iPhone, and so long as I avoided video streaming, I'd usually use 300MB. Now I see that my Maps apps alone use that in a month, and I run out of 6GB bandwidth every month. It's a truism that bandwidth is like highway lanes: If it's there, it will be used. But really, am I getting more functionality for the increased bandwidth? I think not.
- soared 11y ago
  You're blaming devs because you us 6gb a month? That is a joke. I share 15gb with 6 people in my family and we've never gone over. Obviously you are doing something out of the ordinary.
  - stcredzero 11y ago
    The devs must have done something, because I haven't changed how I use Maps. How is it that Maps alone is using the entire allocation of the bandwidth I used to use in a month?
    - r3bl 11y ago
      Not that I want to support Microsoft, but I had the same issue until I switched to HERE (Nokia's old product). Basically I have downloaded a map of my country (~300 MB in size) and set the application to work offline. Works like a charm, does not feel like a downgrade at all.
addicted 11y ago
From my Indian friends on Facebook, it appears Facebook is showing messages that certain friends of yours are supporting, or signed up for Facebook basics, even if they never did anything of the sort. It's creepy, and messed up. Edit: (Leaving the original post untouched), it appears Facebook will show you as having supported Free Basics if you clicked polls which seemed completely unrelated (as the original article points out, polls about "Connected India" for example. Still quite a distance from having supported Free basics, which is what Facebook appears to show.
- cryoshon 11y ago
  Ah yes, the new propaganda of the 21st century: the corporations try to convince you that all your friends are supporting their proposals, and so, you should too. It works. The single most important thing for most humans is being accepted by their confederates. Pay close attention: the corporations have no scruples about manipulating you to get their way, and Facebook is no exception. A conciliatory response to this deception from Zuck himself is warranted; this kind of lie-distribution (to over a billion people) shouldn't be accepted quietly. Furthermore, if Zuck wants his philanthropy efforts to succeed, lying to a billion people to support his company is going to torpedo it.
  - theklub 11y ago
    Might be the last straw for me, time to shut down the old facebook account.
  - pdkl95 11y ago
    > convince you that all your friends are supporting their proposals This is a serious problem, because China already showed us the end game of this tactic with Sesame Credit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHcTKWiZ8sI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHcTKWiZ8sI
- balladeer 11y ago
  My friends kind of know me as a supporter of net neutrality and I was horrified when two of them shared with me their notification screenshots which was showing me as supporting Facebook "Free Basics".
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puranjay 11y ago
Indian here. The manipulation has been incredibly blatant and scummy. It's not even funny anymore. Friends who categorically denied having sent a mail to the Indian telecom regulatory authority on Facebook's behalf (conveniently supplied by Facebook) show up on my feed as having signed the mail. It's an all-out blitzkrieg. I've seen full page ads in newspapers, banners at bus stops, even ads on local Indian websites. It's one of the scummiest things I've seen from a major company.
- jmspring 11y ago
  It doesn't sound any different than what Facebook does regularly. "X likes Y, do you want to like it?", ask X in person, they never liked Y. Facebook, despite the fact I use it, is a slimy ad platform that creates stories at the expense of those that use it. I mean they "market their customer usage". I've yet to see an explanation for the fictitious likes.
- erbdex 11y ago
  Here's a screenshot of what's the permanent top-notification if you're an Indian and on Facebook- http://imgur.com/uykRY8G http://imgur.com/uykRY8G
  - djsumdog 11y ago
    WTF. "Free basic" .. It's two way communication. It's not like fucking 1994 where free TV involved four neighbours going on a satellite dish so you could get 6 channels. Free Basic....get only the limited things we want you to have and the companies who are willing to pay for it. Fuck. That. Shit. Want to do something that will actually help people; what about Free 1GB. Ensure every person gets 1GB of mobile data a month. Then they can go anywhere...use healthcare, government, facebook or....porn. or whatever the fuck they want. I agree, Free Basic is total bullshit.
    - minusSeven 11y ago
      you don't even have to go that far just offer free free 2g (without edge internet). It the slowest speed possible but sites like wikipedia will work well on them. It will help people to know important stuff without wasting time on facebook.
pranayairan 11y ago
Indian here, they even started Television ads showing zuke. It is getting out of hand. There VP of Internet org will be doing an AMA on reddit today !!
TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
Interestingly, Wikimedia also engages in zero-rating, through their Wikipedia Zero program. But their motivations are genuinely altruistic. (After all, it brings them no direct benefit and costs them money.)
- such_a_casual 11y ago
  Wikipedia is a pretty shady organization. For years they have used server costs as one of the main reasons (and in the some cases the main reason) why people should donate. But their finance reports paint a very different picture. Their server costs reflect a very small percentage of their overall costs. They ask for way more money than they actually need. More money is spent on "investments" and fundraisers than is spent on the cost of maintaining the site. Some people have also alleged purposeful backlinking to their for profit sites. That is, adding and replacing links in wikipedia pages to point to websites that the wikipedia founders profit from. So using wikipedia as an example of "genuinely altruistic" motivation is a stretch. The founders of wikipedia do not benefit directly from their work, but they certainly benefit indirectly and through false advertising.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
    > Wikipedia is a pretty shady organization. Wikimedia. They do a lot more than just the encyclopædia. > For years they have used server costs as one of the main reasons (and in the some cases the main reason) why people should donate. But their finance reports paint a very different picture. Their server costs reflect a very small percentage of their overall costs. Server costs are not the only thing they need to spend money on. Consider their budget for 2015-2016: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2015-16#Appendix_A_-_Budget_Detail https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_... 40% of that is spent on engineering. Someone needs to maintain MediaWiki. ~6% is spent on legal - they're a large site that has to deal with copyright issues, they need lawyers. ~15% is spent on administrative costs, as if you employ lots of people, you need to manage them. > They ask for way more money than they actually need. They could run on a leaner budget, yes, but it's not as if the other money they get is wasted. More money means they can hire more engineers to work on the site and improve it, for example. > More money is spent on "investments" and fundraisers than is spent on the cost of maintaining the site. Looking at that budget, they spend more on Engineering than on Community Engagement, Grants, Advancement, and Communications combined. > Some people have also alleged purposeful backlinking to their for profit sites. That is, adding and replacing links in wikipedia pages to point to websites that the wikipedia founders profit from. Could you provide evidence, or at least a credible source?
littletimmy 11y ago
This evokes memories of colonialism. Most Indians I know are like "gtfo we don't need your help" and Zuckerberg is going like "well I'm going to help you whether you like it or not." It is SO obvious he's doing it to make sure Facebook has a permanent hold on the huge and growing Indian market. But to disguise it as a charity, that's scummy as anything I've seen a major company do.
manash 11y ago
Why not let "our less fortunate brothers" decided what they want. If they don't want free internet, then its their choice. How insane is it to let the TRAI regulate the internet! Do you not see the internet is the only real means of liberating people? And you want a group of elite people to control this! What happens to the "these airwaves belong to us" argument when the government bans anti-govt web sites or porn websites or any other websites that the current elite don't agree with? Down with intelligentsia!
- tdaltonc 11y ago
  "Why not let [the customer] choose" is an argument that can be made of any net neutrality debate. Should there be fast-lanes in the US? TWC: We'll offer plans with and without fast-lanes and let the customers choose! Either the internet is the internet or it's not. Facebook wants to bring Facebook to rural villages? Fine, but they have to bring the whole internet with them.
  - manash 11y ago
    "Should there be fast-lanes in the US?" Yes. Why not? Just like should there be expensive doctors, restaurants, entertainment, etc.? Obviously yes. "Either the internet is the internet or it's not. Facebook wants to bring Facebook to rural villages? Fine, but they have to bring the whole internet with them." My point is let the people in the rural villages decided wether they want Facebook internet or other forms of internet. Please don't decide on their behalf. It is very patronizing and antithetical to progess.
    - tdaltonc 11y ago
      Anarchic markets/networks don't always give the best results. The regulators have an important role to play in designing a network that gives the best results to all players. Net neutrality is a good set of principles for creating a network that gives the best results for the people on the network. It's good for networks in the US and it's good for networks in India.
    - deleted 11y ago
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mahranch 11y ago
If I was facebook, I'd tread lightly. India has a long history of reneging on deals. Once a deal is struck with most nations, that's it. Done deal. With India, they don't care - they'll do whatever is convenient for them. They did just that on a huge WTO deal years in the making (source: http://www.npr.org/2014/08/10/339292735/why-indias-modi-defied-the-wto http://www.npr.org/2014/08/10/339292735/why-indias-modi-defi...). The also reneged on a solar energy trade agreement with the U.S (source: http://www.upi.com/Business_News/Energy-Industry/2013/02/07/Indias-solar-program-a-trade-issue/41121360263835/ http://www.upi.com/Business_News/Energy-Industry/2013/02/07/...). Hell, even Russia and China won't back out of deals once struck. They'll piss and moan if it turns out they got the short end of the stick, but they'll still honor the deal. I tell my clients to steer clear of India for this very reason - it's nearly impossible to know when a deal is "solid". There's very little recourse if a business or person reneges on a business deal, or rips you off. I almost hope facebook wins this little battle; India benefits from facebook pumping a bunch of money into India's infrastructure to build it up, supplying internet to the poor, then India says "Nope, sorry facebook, you gotta go. It was nice having you!". Facebook would get what it deserves. I actually wouldn't be surprised if that happens.
- jarsj 11y ago
  I guess you have no idea what this is really about. All we are asking our Govt. is to adopt same Net Neutrality standards that exist in US and other EU countries. Companies like Uber/Amazon are already pumping huge money in India because they need us, not vice-versa. Just because we are open, unlike China, doesn't mean you can play unfair.
  - mahranch 11y ago
    > All we are asking our Govt. is to adopt same Net Neutrality standards that exist in US and other EU countries. I understand that, and support it 100%. I am 100% pro-net neutrality. > Just because we are open, unlike China, doesn't mean you can play unfair. My issue is that India will play unfair. They have a history of it. Say what you will about all the people who have their own anecdotal bad experiences with Indian companies & professionals over the last 5-10 years (dozens of accounts that I've read here, on our very own hackernews), but the simple fact of the matter is that even India's government has a track record of reneging on deals. And these weren't small deals, these were deals years in the making. That's not good for India. Investors will (and are) balking at the idea of entering the Indian market because who knows when India will pull the rug out from under them when the mood strikes. There's also very little legal recourse when that does happen. It doesn't help when your country is among the most corrupt countries on the planet; they ranked 94th in Transparency International's corruption index. There are 93 countries less corrupt than India. Source: http://www.transparency.org/cpi2013/results http://www.transparency.org/cpi2013/results
dunkelheit 11y ago
Today I learned that Indians have a word for ten million (crore). On a more serious note this facebook campaign is an embodiment of principles elucidated Zero to One. Competition sucks, argues Mr. Thiel, try to create a monopoly. And monopoly is great if you are a business but for customers it is other way round. I hope India will preserve open and competitive internet for its citizens. The article states that the chief aim of this campaign is to prevent Indians from using google. Are there any signs of them taking countermeasures?
- nickff 11y ago
  In "Zero to One", (which I just finished reading yesterday), Thiel actually argued that monopolies were good for both sides of the market, so long as the monopoly was achieved through excellence, and not just corruption or government-grant.
titusnicolae 11y ago
is internet really going to help the 600 million people that practice open defecation? if they can't figure out that digging a hole where to poop is clearly better, how will they make good use of the internet and not get themselves manipulated.
jeevand 11y ago
Coming from a rural farming community in India i think this is a very bad deal. I speak with my folks when i visit India about how they use technology. The use cases are very practical such as turning off/on the pumpset, since the fields are far and the power comes and goes at different times, this kind of app is amazing. I can think of similar use cases once IoT takes off. ex: Checking the water levels in paddy fields (The crabs make holes and if you are out of luck all the water is gone, resulting in midnight trips to fields to make sure everything is fine). The startups which might provide these kind of services will do well only if the internet is free, else FB will build its own apps to do this. FB will have a monopoly over the future use cases. The last thing my folks back home need is to play farmville or poke at each other or put booty shots in instagram :)
- tim333 11y ago
  It seems kind of a mixed deal for that stuff. Apparently you can submit your app to use free basics and stuff like you mention should qualify. On the other hand it's easier to put a service on the regular web than to have to apply to Facebook. Actually hacking free basics might be good for things like checking the water levels - you could get a cheap phone pointed at the tank with an app to look at the water, use Facebook's data and enjoy the knowledge that that phone isn't going to be pokeing or candy-crushing. https://developers.facebook.com/docs/internet-org/participation-guidelines https://developers.facebook.com/docs/internet-org/participat...
  - jeevand 11y ago
    I am weary of the gatekeepers, they can change the rules when they want. What would really help from a long term perspective is to provide very low cost data plans, this might not happen if we go the free basics route since telcos have vested interest in keeping the free basics forever by jacking up the cost of data plans.
mirimir 11y ago
With neither Linkedin nor Facebook accounts, I can't read this article. But maybe this one is just as useful: http://www.hindustantimes.com/tech/facebook-campaign-gets-more-teeth-as-d-day-closes-in/story-uNSG0z09Pp8TgdJnlTG6LL.html http://www.hindustantimes.com/tech/facebook-campaign-gets-mo...
la6470 11y ago
The Indian poor people may be poor but they are not fools. A substandard service will not take off just like Tata Nano car for the poor failed miserably so will this Facebook initiative.
rexpop 11y ago
While I'm curious about the pros and cons of a gratis walled garden, was the greater offense the way Facebook used their presence to affect political change? Would it have been offensive to do so in an attempt to counteract pollution?
- rando289 11y ago
  Yes. If it was an extremely self interested cleanup of only a certain kind of pollution which it would only help with on the condition that other more important kinds of pollution increased or got much less attention, and would lead to much worse long term consequences, and facebook was completelly scummy spamming everyone about "if you don't want this, you want babies to die of pollution."
rsync 11y ago
The real question is, will facebook lobby against, and attempt to disallow, free community / coop network access ? It's one thing to trick a bunch of poor people into thinking you're giving them free Internet access ... it's still free. It's quite another to then shackle them by manipulating their legal system into disallowing any other free options. I have a lot on my plate right now, but it sure would be interesting to do a very small scale proof of concept free wifi mesh anywhere in India ... just to see who that pisses off ... I see my favorite bulk IP provider (he.net) has zero presence in India, so that doesn't make things quick and simple ... we'll see ...
- marcoperaza 11y ago
  Hundreds of millions of people in India don't even have access to electricity, let alone internet. The Indian government is extremely corrupt and over-regulating. They have failed to bring modernity to a billion people. That's the context here. From what I can tell, Free Basics is a market solution that will allow a bunch of self-interested parties to bring connectivity to people who would probably never get it otherwise. If there are all of these other alternatives, why doesn't someone set them up as a competitor to Free Basics. No one would use a limited service like Free Basics if they had free access to "real" internet access.
  - firasd 11y ago
    What makes you think Free Basics is doing anything about electricity or connectivity? It is just zero-rating for Facebook & partner apps, riding on top of infrastructure and services built by existing telecom networks in the country with the "extremely corrupt" and "failed" government.
    - marcoperaza 11y ago
      Why the scare quotes around "extremely corrupt"? Do you really think otherwise? India is notorious for pervasive total corruption from top to bottom. Facebook is not doing anything about electricity; I mention that statistic to demonstrate how modern infrastructure has failed to reach a huge portion of Indians. Facebook has come up with a business model that can reach people that don't have the ability to pay out of pocket for ANY connectivity. By making it profitable for telecoms to serve these people, Free Basics would encourage that infrastructure to expand to the one billion people it hasn't reached.
vankap 11y ago
This is deception. Pure and simple. There are many different and ethical ways of providing connectivity to the poor but not at the cost of losing net neutrality.
marcoperaza 11y ago
If there are alternative ways to bring internet access to the billion unconnected Indians, then why does the Indian government need to ban Free Basics? Those alternatives can be set up in parallel. No one will use Free Basics if the alternative is free "real" internet access.
txtsd 11y ago
I'm still mad that facebook hasn't unblocked the I Fucking Love Science page yet here in India. Why would anyone block a page about science while letting the religious bullshit/reposts runs rampant?
cmurf 11y ago
If I understand this right, it means poor people don't actually get the Internet. They get Facebook. Ergo it's a regression back to pre-Internet "Prodigy" and "Compuserve" and "AOL" only days, for poor people. And then they get piles of ads in their face. It's not really the Internet. So is that better than nothing? I think that's up to the users to decide rather than people who have the real Internet. But I also think it's misleading to refer to this as "digital equality" or that Facebook and friends constitutes "essential internet services." The only essential Internet service is the fucking connection to the unabridged Internet. So call it what it actually is. Don't exaggerate (lie). EDIT: I don't use Facebook, at all. I have tons of friends who don't use it, at all. So how "essential" is it? I'm completely OK with them giving free Facebook + only whatever else they want, but it's b.s. to call this essential or basic. It's not even really free if people are getting ad bombed to pay for it.. So yeah, let people have whatever this is, it's fine, but don't lie/mislead about what it is.
anilgulecha 11y ago
On the ethics of this, I'd like to know of the engineers/team in the chain of command who is responsible for the "Something went wrong" flag set on savetheinternet.in : http://i.imgur.com/K3JUack.png http://i.imgur.com/K3JUack.png Clearly this flag was not set on the grounds of pornography/violent matter/malicious link. This flag was instead set on a what is political speech, representing activists from a large swath of a democratic nation. Consider how big of an attack this is on speech. Consider if a prominent website of any other political thought were thus flagged, and warned users away from. To any folks from facebook reading this: please point out the team/engineers and the whole chain of command responsible for this flag -- this suppression is not a tiny thing.
- peter_l_downs 11y ago
  Hey, that's my screenshot. I can't edit my comment below any more but I think this is misleading – other links to savetheinternet.in work fine from facebook (try it yourself). There are a lot of other scammy things going on that are more important than this small technical issue, I'd delete my comment if I could.
- deleted 11y ago
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- gamekathu 11y ago
  they were even suppressing a popular Indian youtube comedy channel's take on this issue when it was released. And yes, fb does internally censor things which they dont like, for eg they were actively blocking tsu.co, a rival social network url in their platform until it hit the media and they had to backtrack
- Perixoog 11y ago
  The original article link to http://www.SaveTheInternet.in http://www.SaveTheInternet.in is actually to http://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.SaveTheInternet.in%2F&h=6AQGru1wmAQHNGnvS78FliWb9MURKuXto-djOIpw5XJQEpg&enc=AZOjd9wIUn_2Sr9HwmrDiTdS-9JClWS9N1aPg2_CaVutKdgFbqMeCM2x7k29GJU7pWRxTAmDpDwO1I8Spp9lOw201zOMt66s3PStaD51j8m42--MweupC6QEbUvyuMdHo6LAsYRK-fBiFLGFCVz2VjkRsFREf-tZE7SuD3qcmJjfHV2LmyXlvUgllPr1HZt5E74&s=1 http://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.SaveTheIntern... That looks like a link where facebook has replaced the link to the website with their own URL for tracking purposes. As a consequence they have to prevent open redirect attacks - https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Open_redirect https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Open_redirect . Yes the same system can be used for censorship - but facebook can do that anyway because you're sharing links through a platform they have total control over. The irony (of using a facebook tracking url to promote an anti-facebook site) is beautiful.
tr33fiddy 11y ago
This album shows the kind of things Facebook is doing to push Free Basics. http://m.imgur.com/gallery/dnAFg http://m.imgur.com/gallery/dnAFg
vinay_ys 11y ago
First let's keep affordability aside and think about this. Internet is built on principles of neutrality. It is built on public property (airways, land) that government leases to companies on our behalf. Internet is what it is today because of this neutrality principle. It has given rise to so many companies out of nothingness and created so much opportunity for disruption and growth. So any We do not want to turn Internet into something useless and backwards (like cable/tv networks). That is what Facebook is trying to do here by lobbying the government to change policy. This has to be stopped no question. Now let's talk about affordability. Government should look into programs that will lower the overall cost of Internet by reforming how they license spectrum. They can also provide free access to Internet in public places - like public schools, public libraries, train/bus stations, agri markets etc where most information hungry people who cannot afford are already there. They can also encourage large city/town center operators to provide free wifi. All said, most poor people in India who don't have Internet are in tier-2/3 cities and villages where there is no connectivity at all today. So, it is not a question of affordability but connectivity. Facebook is being irresponsible and evil in this case and exploiting the situation and not doing anything to help. In contrast, google recently launched a program to provide high-speed Internet free wifi in 400 train stations in India. This is the largest public wifi program in the world.
- vinchuco 11y ago
  Move fast and break things vs. Don't be evil
Sven7 11y ago
At the end of the story a few people in Silicon Valley will get disproportionately richer than everyone else.
jacquesm 11y ago
The dissonance between Mark Zuckerberg's letter to his daughter and stuff like this is hard to bridge.
TheSpiceIsLife 11y ago
Free Facebook means free Facebook Messenger. Give a billion people free Facebook Messenger and I'm sure someone will develop an IoFM 'Internet over Facebook Messenger' protocol. On another note, AOL was a walled-garden and look where that ended up.
- ex3ndr 11y ago
  This is impossible, Facebook Messenger doesn't have any open protocol at all. Facebook will fight everyone who will try to do so.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 11y ago
    Impossible? HTML is plain text.
shkesar 11y ago
> for every new user that comes on the internet, Facebook makes Rs. 8, while Google makes aroumd Rs. 48 Where are these figures from? Who pays facebook for signups? Just looking for an insight into this.
- firasd 11y ago
  He's probably just dividing their revenue (or some other financial metric) by the number of users.
  - shkesar 11y ago
    Fine. Thanks.
watmough 11y ago
Facebook needs to stop a homegrown Facebook alternative arising in India. They need to stop it now, by smothering it in the crib, redirecting its potential future users into a Facebook-curated walled-garden. Growth is required for Facebook, and India is a clear growth area, China having been largely ruled off-limits by the Chinese government. A toehold in one of the most populous countries on the planet. Has to have the Facebook board salivating.
salgernon 11y ago
I think this could all be resolved by letting Facebook pay the cost, but if they're going to restrict where you can go, require that they are restricting it to a competitor. Twitter maybe? lesswrong? And first level outgoing links from those sources.

804 points by temp 11y ago

ZoF 11y ago

For those of us without a linkedin/facebook: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/facebook-misleading-indians-its-full-page-ads-free-basics-murthy http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

gamekathu 11y ago

finally more people are speaking about it. its sad to see facebook revert to cheap publicity stunt tactics to get their way around. I always had a good impression of FB specially for their open source tools which I use a lot, and I really hope they can put this murky event behind them and go back to the way they were. n.b : link to the full page ads : http://imgur.com/a/hb3nt http://imgur.com/a/hb3nt

logingone 11y ago
Really? My first encounter with facebook was when I got spammed by a guy I barely knew, along with the rest of his email address book. I've always found the company to be slimy.
- gamekathu 11y ago
  The company might be super slimy, but their engineering team has made huge improvements to the modern web / app development and had gifted us with the awesome open source tools. Only because of them I had a positive outlook of the company
  - ino 11y ago
    If you write apps for their ecosystem, you've been fucked real, but real hard at least 6 times in the last 6 years. From unkept promises to everchanging rules, terms and api.
    - rckclmbr 11y ago
      So you dont use react, flow, presto, hhvm, buck, jest, etc.... ?
  - MichaelGG 11y ago
    So they give away stuff that's effectively irrelevant to their business and that should cause a positive impression? You shouldn't let what might be called a Trojan Horse to change your impression of them.

ghughes 11y ago

Even if this is entirely well-intentioned, which is certainly up for debate, it sets a precedent that will eventually see the world's most powerful media corporations become gatekeepers of the internet. The web has been so successful because of any one of us can fire up a text editor and create the next phenomenon without spending a single dollar or seeking anyone's permission. This is not charity, it is a coup d'état.

sremani 11y ago
Let us not judge from Intellectual Ivory towers, the facts on the ground are 80% of Indians do not have internet access. You sometimes have to try "impure" methods. The question is still up in the air, whether FB Basics is gateway to full internet or if it is a walled garden. Either way, it is better than No Access. The immediate retort I get is, why not facebook provide free internet access to poor. Guys, is it their responsibility to give internet connection without any thing in return? How about asking that to your IAS uncle? or Politician neighbor. The Net Neutrality activists of India, are bunch of middle class disconnected from poor activists. They think their idealogical purity is paramount than a dirty limited connection for the poor. I am afraid populism will one more time win the day, while NN activists take a victory lap, the India's poor now will not have any form of connectivity.
- firasd 11y ago
  The problem is once you've tried this "impure" method there is no turning back. Once an ISP finds out they can offer some apps free but make other apps count towards data usage, the whole nature of the internet changes. Note that zero-rating is just one aspect of what mobile networks want to do; before the explosive activism in March, they were being more flagrant and trying to charge extra for each WhatsApp message or add extra charges for Skype calls.
  - sremani 11y ago
    Isn't that happening on T-Mobile as we speak in US, and yet people are moving in droves cutting their broadband to mobile Internet. I am for Net Neutrality in general, course correction is and has been always a part of regulation and I acknowledge it is slow, but let it play out.

firasd 11y ago

I don’t have much to add after the last couple threads on this (my concerns boil down to the importance of net neutrality, and the obscuring way free Facebook plus a few dozen apps is presented as philanthropy) but it’s interesting that after 36 countries, as they say, “embraced” internet.org, India may finally be where Mark Zuckerberg’s ambitions run aground. We have a specific mix of an established tech ecosystem, educated middle class, and active (though imperfect) democracy, all of which combined to spark a grassroots movement for net neutrality. I hope we can resist Facebook’s lobbying, whether visible marketing like this or backroom deals with telecom networks and governments. P.S. Not to mention the aspect I’ve seen many people bring up: a Western corporation trying to aggressively meddle in India has an unhappy precedent.

gpvos 11y ago
>a Western corporation trying to aggressively meddle in India has an unhappy precedent. Are you referring to the East India Company as the linked article does? Please be clear, I am not familiar enough with Indian history, and I've seen no-one else bring it up on this page.
- firasd 11y ago
  Yeah, I see people reference colonialism in general as well as the EIC in particular.
  - gpvos 11y ago
    Okay, I was just curious if you meant something more recent that I was not aware of. (Not that the colonial era wasn't bad enough, mind you.)
- chimeracoder 11y ago
  > the East India Company Companies. There were several - British, Swedish French, Dutch, Portuguese, you name it. The British ended up taking the rest over, but practically every European colonial power had their own East India Company at one point or another (or tried to) and they all competed on how best to exploit the resources they could extract from India.

mtgx 11y ago

Over the next few years, someone should also look into how much of that "philanthropy" money is going into Internet.org from Zuckerberg - mainly because I'd hate for him to get away with most people believing he's giving away his fortune for the good of mankind, when in fact he'd just be propping up Facebook, but with fewer taxes on his money.

propogandist 11y ago
there was no mention of philanthropy, it was PR stunt. All Zuckerburg did was move his wealth to a private LLC, it's the degenerate media and press that interpreted it as "philanthropy", probably to get some Likes on their FB post.
- soared 11y ago
  Besides his entire letter saying it was being given to charity you mean?
  - propogandist 11y ago
    show me that letter you may want to revist it https://blogs.harvard.edu/philg/2015/12/03/is-the-new-zuckerberg-fake-charity-an-estate-tax-avoidance-scheme/ https://blogs.harvard.edu/philg/2015/12/03/is-the-new-zucker...
jsprogrammer 11y ago
His 'fortune' is primarily a claim on future FB revenue. It can be wiped out at any time.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

chdir 11y ago

http://www.savetheinternet.in http://www.savetheinternet.in - A template for contacting the authorities to show support for net neutrality (speak up against "Free Basics"). Last time, they received over a million e-mails [0], and that did have a positive effect. Let's 10x that. [0] http://bit.ly/1YCxhlv http://bit.ly/1YCxhlv

vickychijwani 11y ago
Facebook is doing its best to stop people from accessing this as well -- if I click a link to that website from Facebook, I get a message that seems designed to stop me from going ahead. It says, "Something Went Wrong. Sorry, there was a problem with this link: http://www.SaveTheInternet.in/ http://www.SaveTheInternet.in/ You can now continue to this website, or go back to the page you were on before. Remember, only follow links from sources you trust."
chdir 11y ago
A pseudo-live count of e-mails sent to TRAI in support of #NetNeutrality https://twitter.com/bulletinbabu https://twitter.com/bulletinbabu

stcredzero 11y ago

Okay, if an activist can contemplate a program giving everyone in India who wants it 500MB a month mobile bandwidth, then I have to call out western web app developers for committing a heinous crimes against global Internet access equality. It used to be that I could get by with a 500MB plan on my iPhone, and so long as I avoided video streaming, I'd usually use 300MB. Now I see that my Maps apps alone use that in a month, and I run out of 6GB bandwidth every month. It's a truism that bandwidth is like highway lanes: If it's there, it will be used. But really, am I getting more functionality for the increased bandwidth? I think not.

soared 11y ago
You're blaming devs because you us 6gb a month? That is a joke. I share 15gb with 6 people in my family and we've never gone over. Obviously you are doing something out of the ordinary.
- stcredzero 11y ago
  The devs must have done something, because I haven't changed how I use Maps. How is it that Maps alone is using the entire allocation of the bandwidth I used to use in a month?
  - r3bl 11y ago
    Not that I want to support Microsoft, but I had the same issue until I switched to HERE (Nokia's old product). Basically I have downloaded a map of my country (~300 MB in size) and set the application to work offline. Works like a charm, does not feel like a downgrade at all.

addicted 11y ago

From my Indian friends on Facebook, it appears Facebook is showing messages that certain friends of yours are supporting, or signed up for Facebook basics, even if they never did anything of the sort. It's creepy, and messed up. Edit: (Leaving the original post untouched), it appears Facebook will show you as having supported Free Basics if you clicked polls which seemed completely unrelated (as the original article points out, polls about "Connected India" for example. Still quite a distance from having supported Free basics, which is what Facebook appears to show.

cryoshon 11y ago
Ah yes, the new propaganda of the 21st century: the corporations try to convince you that all your friends are supporting their proposals, and so, you should too. It works. The single most important thing for most humans is being accepted by their confederates. Pay close attention: the corporations have no scruples about manipulating you to get their way, and Facebook is no exception. A conciliatory response to this deception from Zuck himself is warranted; this kind of lie-distribution (to over a billion people) shouldn't be accepted quietly. Furthermore, if Zuck wants his philanthropy efforts to succeed, lying to a billion people to support his company is going to torpedo it.
- theklub 11y ago
  Might be the last straw for me, time to shut down the old facebook account.
- pdkl95 11y ago
  > convince you that all your friends are supporting their proposals This is a serious problem, because China already showed us the end game of this tactic with Sesame Credit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHcTKWiZ8sI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHcTKWiZ8sI
balladeer 11y ago
My friends kind of know me as a supporter of net neutrality and I was horrified when two of them shared with me their notification screenshots which was showing me as supporting Facebook "Free Basics".

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

puranjay 11y ago

Indian here. The manipulation has been incredibly blatant and scummy. It's not even funny anymore. Friends who categorically denied having sent a mail to the Indian telecom regulatory authority on Facebook's behalf (conveniently supplied by Facebook) show up on my feed as having signed the mail. It's an all-out blitzkrieg. I've seen full page ads in newspapers, banners at bus stops, even ads on local Indian websites. It's one of the scummiest things I've seen from a major company.

jmspring 11y ago
It doesn't sound any different than what Facebook does regularly. "X likes Y, do you want to like it?", ask X in person, they never liked Y. Facebook, despite the fact I use it, is a slimy ad platform that creates stories at the expense of those that use it. I mean they "market their customer usage". I've yet to see an explanation for the fictitious likes.
erbdex 11y ago
Here's a screenshot of what's the permanent top-notification if you're an Indian and on Facebook- http://imgur.com/uykRY8G http://imgur.com/uykRY8G
- djsumdog 11y ago
  WTF. "Free basic" .. It's two way communication. It's not like fucking 1994 where free TV involved four neighbours going on a satellite dish so you could get 6 channels. Free Basic....get only the limited things we want you to have and the companies who are willing to pay for it. Fuck. That. Shit. Want to do something that will actually help people; what about Free 1GB. Ensure every person gets 1GB of mobile data a month. Then they can go anywhere...use healthcare, government, facebook or....porn. or whatever the fuck they want. I agree, Free Basic is total bullshit.
  - minusSeven 11y ago
    you don't even have to go that far just offer free free 2g (without edge internet). It the slowest speed possible but sites like wikipedia will work well on them. It will help people to know important stuff without wasting time on facebook.

pranayairan 11y ago

Indian here, they even started Television ads showing zuke. It is getting out of hand. There VP of Internet org will be doing an AMA on reddit today !!

TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago

Interestingly, Wikimedia also engages in zero-rating, through their Wikipedia Zero program. But their motivations are genuinely altruistic. (After all, it brings them no direct benefit and costs them money.)

such_a_casual 11y ago
Wikipedia is a pretty shady organization. For years they have used server costs as one of the main reasons (and in the some cases the main reason) why people should donate. But their finance reports paint a very different picture. Their server costs reflect a very small percentage of their overall costs. They ask for way more money than they actually need. More money is spent on "investments" and fundraisers than is spent on the cost of maintaining the site. Some people have also alleged purposeful backlinking to their for profit sites. That is, adding and replacing links in wikipedia pages to point to websites that the wikipedia founders profit from. So using wikipedia as an example of "genuinely altruistic" motivation is a stretch. The founders of wikipedia do not benefit directly from their work, but they certainly benefit indirectly and through false advertising.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
  > Wikipedia is a pretty shady organization. Wikimedia. They do a lot more than just the encyclopædia. > For years they have used server costs as one of the main reasons (and in the some cases the main reason) why people should donate. But their finance reports paint a very different picture. Their server costs reflect a very small percentage of their overall costs. Server costs are not the only thing they need to spend money on. Consider their budget for 2015-2016: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2015-16#Appendix_A_-_Budget_Detail https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_... 40% of that is spent on engineering. Someone needs to maintain MediaWiki. ~6% is spent on legal - they're a large site that has to deal with copyright issues, they need lawyers. ~15% is spent on administrative costs, as if you employ lots of people, you need to manage them. > They ask for way more money than they actually need. They could run on a leaner budget, yes, but it's not as if the other money they get is wasted. More money means they can hire more engineers to work on the site and improve it, for example. > More money is spent on "investments" and fundraisers than is spent on the cost of maintaining the site. Looking at that budget, they spend more on Engineering than on Community Engagement, Grants, Advancement, and Communications combined. > Some people have also alleged purposeful backlinking to their for profit sites. That is, adding and replacing links in wikipedia pages to point to websites that the wikipedia founders profit from. Could you provide evidence, or at least a credible source?

littletimmy 11y ago

This evokes memories of colonialism. Most Indians I know are like "gtfo we don't need your help" and Zuckerberg is going like "well I'm going to help you whether you like it or not." It is SO obvious he's doing it to make sure Facebook has a permanent hold on the huge and growing Indian market. But to disguise it as a charity, that's scummy as anything I've seen a major company do.

manash 11y ago

Why not let "our less fortunate brothers" decided what they want. If they don't want free internet, then its their choice. How insane is it to let the TRAI regulate the internet! Do you not see the internet is the only real means of liberating people? And you want a group of elite people to control this! What happens to the "these airwaves belong to us" argument when the government bans anti-govt web sites or porn websites or any other websites that the current elite don't agree with? Down with intelligentsia!

tdaltonc 11y ago
"Why not let [the customer] choose" is an argument that can be made of any net neutrality debate. Should there be fast-lanes in the US? TWC: We'll offer plans with and without fast-lanes and let the customers choose! Either the internet is the internet or it's not. Facebook wants to bring Facebook to rural villages? Fine, but they have to bring the whole internet with them.
- manash 11y ago
  "Should there be fast-lanes in the US?" Yes. Why not? Just like should there be expensive doctors, restaurants, entertainment, etc.? Obviously yes. "Either the internet is the internet or it's not. Facebook wants to bring Facebook to rural villages? Fine, but they have to bring the whole internet with them." My point is let the people in the rural villages decided wether they want Facebook internet or other forms of internet. Please don't decide on their behalf. It is very patronizing and antithetical to progess.
  - tdaltonc 11y ago
    Anarchic markets/networks don't always give the best results. The regulators have an important role to play in designing a network that gives the best results to all players. Net neutrality is a good set of principles for creating a network that gives the best results for the people on the network. It's good for networks in the US and it's good for networks in India.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]

mahranch 11y ago

If I was facebook, I'd tread lightly. India has a long history of reneging on deals. Once a deal is struck with most nations, that's it. Done deal. With India, they don't care - they'll do whatever is convenient for them. They did just that on a huge WTO deal years in the making (source: http://www.npr.org/2014/08/10/339292735/why-indias-modi-defied-the-wto http://www.npr.org/2014/08/10/339292735/why-indias-modi-defi...). The also reneged on a solar energy trade agreement with the U.S (source: http://www.upi.com/Business_News/Energy-Industry/2013/02/07/Indias-solar-program-a-trade-issue/41121360263835/ http://www.upi.com/Business_News/Energy-Industry/2013/02/07/...). Hell, even Russia and China won't back out of deals once struck. They'll piss and moan if it turns out they got the short end of the stick, but they'll still honor the deal. I tell my clients to steer clear of India for this very reason - it's nearly impossible to know when a deal is "solid". There's very little recourse if a business or person reneges on a business deal, or rips you off. I almost hope facebook wins this little battle; India benefits from facebook pumping a bunch of money into India's infrastructure to build it up, supplying internet to the poor, then India says "Nope, sorry facebook, you gotta go. It was nice having you!". Facebook would get what it deserves. I actually wouldn't be surprised if that happens.

jarsj 11y ago
I guess you have no idea what this is really about. All we are asking our Govt. is to adopt same Net Neutrality standards that exist in US and other EU countries. Companies like Uber/Amazon are already pumping huge money in India because they need us, not vice-versa. Just because we are open, unlike China, doesn't mean you can play unfair.
- mahranch 11y ago
  > All we are asking our Govt. is to adopt same Net Neutrality standards that exist in US and other EU countries. I understand that, and support it 100%. I am 100% pro-net neutrality. > Just because we are open, unlike China, doesn't mean you can play unfair. My issue is that India will play unfair. They have a history of it. Say what you will about all the people who have their own anecdotal bad experiences with Indian companies & professionals over the last 5-10 years (dozens of accounts that I've read here, on our very own hackernews), but the simple fact of the matter is that even India's government has a track record of reneging on deals. And these weren't small deals, these were deals years in the making. That's not good for India. Investors will (and are) balking at the idea of entering the Indian market because who knows when India will pull the rug out from under them when the mood strikes. There's also very little legal recourse when that does happen. It doesn't help when your country is among the most corrupt countries on the planet; they ranked 94th in Transparency International's corruption index. There are 93 countries less corrupt than India. Source: http://www.transparency.org/cpi2013/results http://www.transparency.org/cpi2013/results

dunkelheit 11y ago

Today I learned that Indians have a word for ten million (crore). On a more serious note this facebook campaign is an embodiment of principles elucidated Zero to One. Competition sucks, argues Mr. Thiel, try to create a monopoly. And monopoly is great if you are a business but for customers it is other way round. I hope India will preserve open and competitive internet for its citizens. The article states that the chief aim of this campaign is to prevent Indians from using google. Are there any signs of them taking countermeasures?

nickff 11y ago
In "Zero to One", (which I just finished reading yesterday), Thiel actually argued that monopolies were good for both sides of the market, so long as the monopoly was achieved through excellence, and not just corruption or government-grant.

titusnicolae 11y ago

is internet really going to help the 600 million people that practice open defecation? if they can't figure out that digging a hole where to poop is clearly better, how will they make good use of the internet and not get themselves manipulated.

jeevand 11y ago

Coming from a rural farming community in India i think this is a very bad deal. I speak with my folks when i visit India about how they use technology. The use cases are very practical such as turning off/on the pumpset, since the fields are far and the power comes and goes at different times, this kind of app is amazing. I can think of similar use cases once IoT takes off. ex: Checking the water levels in paddy fields (The crabs make holes and if you are out of luck all the water is gone, resulting in midnight trips to fields to make sure everything is fine). The startups which might provide these kind of services will do well only if the internet is free, else FB will build its own apps to do this. FB will have a monopoly over the future use cases. The last thing my folks back home need is to play farmville or poke at each other or put booty shots in instagram :)

tim333 11y ago
It seems kind of a mixed deal for that stuff. Apparently you can submit your app to use free basics and stuff like you mention should qualify. On the other hand it's easier to put a service on the regular web than to have to apply to Facebook. Actually hacking free basics might be good for things like checking the water levels - you could get a cheap phone pointed at the tank with an app to look at the water, use Facebook's data and enjoy the knowledge that that phone isn't going to be pokeing or candy-crushing. https://developers.facebook.com/docs/internet-org/participation-guidelines https://developers.facebook.com/docs/internet-org/participat...
- jeevand 11y ago
  I am weary of the gatekeepers, they can change the rules when they want. What would really help from a long term perspective is to provide very low cost data plans, this might not happen if we go the free basics route since telcos have vested interest in keeping the free basics forever by jacking up the cost of data plans.

mirimir 11y ago

With neither Linkedin nor Facebook accounts, I can't read this article. But maybe this one is just as useful: http://www.hindustantimes.com/tech/facebook-campaign-gets-more-teeth-as-d-day-closes-in/story-uNSG0z09Pp8TgdJnlTG6LL.html http://www.hindustantimes.com/tech/facebook-campaign-gets-mo...

la6470 11y ago

The Indian poor people may be poor but they are not fools. A substandard service will not take off just like Tata Nano car for the poor failed miserably so will this Facebook initiative.

rexpop 11y ago

While I'm curious about the pros and cons of a gratis walled garden, was the greater offense the way Facebook used their presence to affect political change? Would it have been offensive to do so in an attempt to counteract pollution?

rando289 11y ago
Yes. If it was an extremely self interested cleanup of only a certain kind of pollution which it would only help with on the condition that other more important kinds of pollution increased or got much less attention, and would lead to much worse long term consequences, and facebook was completelly scummy spamming everyone about "if you don't want this, you want babies to die of pollution."

rsync 11y ago

The real question is, will facebook lobby against, and attempt to disallow, free community / coop network access ? It's one thing to trick a bunch of poor people into thinking you're giving them free Internet access ... it's still free. It's quite another to then shackle them by manipulating their legal system into disallowing any other free options. I have a lot on my plate right now, but it sure would be interesting to do a very small scale proof of concept free wifi mesh anywhere in India ... just to see who that pisses off ... I see my favorite bulk IP provider (he.net) has zero presence in India, so that doesn't make things quick and simple ... we'll see ...

marcoperaza 11y ago
Hundreds of millions of people in India don't even have access to electricity, let alone internet. The Indian government is extremely corrupt and over-regulating. They have failed to bring modernity to a billion people. That's the context here. From what I can tell, Free Basics is a market solution that will allow a bunch of self-interested parties to bring connectivity to people who would probably never get it otherwise. If there are all of these other alternatives, why doesn't someone set them up as a competitor to Free Basics. No one would use a limited service like Free Basics if they had free access to "real" internet access.
- firasd 11y ago
  What makes you think Free Basics is doing anything about electricity or connectivity? It is just zero-rating for Facebook & partner apps, riding on top of infrastructure and services built by existing telecom networks in the country with the "extremely corrupt" and "failed" government.
  - marcoperaza 11y ago
    Why the scare quotes around "extremely corrupt"? Do you really think otherwise? India is notorious for pervasive total corruption from top to bottom. Facebook is not doing anything about electricity; I mention that statistic to demonstrate how modern infrastructure has failed to reach a huge portion of Indians. Facebook has come up with a business model that can reach people that don't have the ability to pay out of pocket for ANY connectivity. By making it profitable for telecoms to serve these people, Free Basics would encourage that infrastructure to expand to the one billion people it hasn't reached.

vankap 11y ago

This is deception. Pure and simple. There are many different and ethical ways of providing connectivity to the poor but not at the cost of losing net neutrality.

marcoperaza 11y ago

If there are alternative ways to bring internet access to the billion unconnected Indians, then why does the Indian government need to ban Free Basics? Those alternatives can be set up in parallel. No one will use Free Basics if the alternative is free "real" internet access.

txtsd 11y ago

I'm still mad that facebook hasn't unblocked the I Fucking Love Science page yet here in India. Why would anyone block a page about science while letting the religious bullshit/reposts runs rampant?

cmurf 11y ago

If I understand this right, it means poor people don't actually get the Internet. They get Facebook. Ergo it's a regression back to pre-Internet "Prodigy" and "Compuserve" and "AOL" only days, for poor people. And then they get piles of ads in their face. It's not really the Internet. So is that better than nothing? I think that's up to the users to decide rather than people who have the real Internet. But I also think it's misleading to refer to this as "digital equality" or that Facebook and friends constitutes "essential internet services." The only essential Internet service is the fucking connection to the unabridged Internet. So call it what it actually is. Don't exaggerate (lie). EDIT: I don't use Facebook, at all. I have tons of friends who don't use it, at all. So how "essential" is it? I'm completely OK with them giving free Facebook + only whatever else they want, but it's b.s. to call this essential or basic. It's not even really free if people are getting ad bombed to pay for it.. So yeah, let people have whatever this is, it's fine, but don't lie/mislead about what it is.

anilgulecha 11y ago

On the ethics of this, I'd like to know of the engineers/team in the chain of command who is responsible for the "Something went wrong" flag set on savetheinternet.in : http://i.imgur.com/K3JUack.png http://i.imgur.com/K3JUack.png Clearly this flag was not set on the grounds of pornography/violent matter/malicious link. This flag was instead set on a what is political speech, representing activists from a large swath of a democratic nation. Consider how big of an attack this is on speech. Consider if a prominent website of any other political thought were thus flagged, and warned users away from. To any folks from facebook reading this: please point out the team/engineers and the whole chain of command responsible for this flag -- this suppression is not a tiny thing.

peter_l_downs 11y ago
Hey, that's my screenshot. I can't edit my comment below any more but I think this is misleading – other links to savetheinternet.in work fine from facebook (try it yourself). There are a lot of other scammy things going on that are more important than this small technical issue, I'd delete my comment if I could.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
gamekathu 11y ago
they were even suppressing a popular Indian youtube comedy channel's take on this issue when it was released. And yes, fb does internally censor things which they dont like, for eg they were actively blocking tsu.co, a rival social network url in their platform until it hit the media and they had to backtrack
Perixoog 11y ago
The original article link to http://www.SaveTheInternet.in http://www.SaveTheInternet.in is actually to http://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.SaveTheInternet.in%2F&h=6AQGru1wmAQHNGnvS78FliWb9MURKuXto-djOIpw5XJQEpg&enc=AZOjd9wIUn_2Sr9HwmrDiTdS-9JClWS9N1aPg2_CaVutKdgFbqMeCM2x7k29GJU7pWRxTAmDpDwO1I8Spp9lOw201zOMt66s3PStaD51j8m42--MweupC6QEbUvyuMdHo6LAsYRK-fBiFLGFCVz2VjkRsFREf-tZE7SuD3qcmJjfHV2LmyXlvUgllPr1HZt5E74&s=1 http://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.SaveTheIntern... That looks like a link where facebook has replaced the link to the website with their own URL for tracking purposes. As a consequence they have to prevent open redirect attacks - https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Open_redirect https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Open_redirect . Yes the same system can be used for censorship - but facebook can do that anyway because you're sharing links through a platform they have total control over. The irony (of using a facebook tracking url to promote an anti-facebook site) is beautiful.

tr33fiddy 11y ago

This album shows the kind of things Facebook is doing to push Free Basics. http://m.imgur.com/gallery/dnAFg http://m.imgur.com/gallery/dnAFg

vinay_ys 11y ago

First let's keep affordability aside and think about this. Internet is built on principles of neutrality. It is built on public property (airways, land) that government leases to companies on our behalf. Internet is what it is today because of this neutrality principle. It has given rise to so many companies out of nothingness and created so much opportunity for disruption and growth. So any We do not want to turn Internet into something useless and backwards (like cable/tv networks). That is what Facebook is trying to do here by lobbying the government to change policy. This has to be stopped no question. Now let's talk about affordability. Government should look into programs that will lower the overall cost of Internet by reforming how they license spectrum. They can also provide free access to Internet in public places - like public schools, public libraries, train/bus stations, agri markets etc where most information hungry people who cannot afford are already there. They can also encourage large city/town center operators to provide free wifi. All said, most poor people in India who don't have Internet are in tier-2/3 cities and villages where there is no connectivity at all today. So, it is not a question of affordability but connectivity. Facebook is being irresponsible and evil in this case and exploiting the situation and not doing anything to help. In contrast, google recently launched a program to provide high-speed Internet free wifi in 400 train stations in India. This is the largest public wifi program in the world.

vinchuco 11y ago
Move fast and break things vs. Don't be evil

Sven7 11y ago

At the end of the story a few people in Silicon Valley will get disproportionately richer than everyone else.

jacquesm 11y ago

The dissonance between Mark Zuckerberg's letter to his daughter and stuff like this is hard to bridge.

TheSpiceIsLife 11y ago

Free Facebook means free Facebook Messenger. Give a billion people free Facebook Messenger and I'm sure someone will develop an IoFM 'Internet over Facebook Messenger' protocol. On another note, AOL was a walled-garden and look where that ended up.

ex3ndr 11y ago
This is impossible, Facebook Messenger doesn't have any open protocol at all. Facebook will fight everyone who will try to do so.
- TheSpiceIsLife 11y ago
  Impossible? HTML is plain text.

shkesar 11y ago

> for every new user that comes on the internet, Facebook makes Rs. 8, while Google makes aroumd Rs. 48 Where are these figures from? Who pays facebook for signups? Just looking for an insight into this.

firasd 11y ago
He's probably just dividing their revenue (or some other financial metric) by the number of users.
- shkesar 11y ago
  Fine. Thanks.

watmough 11y ago

Facebook needs to stop a homegrown Facebook alternative arising in India. They need to stop it now, by smothering it in the crib, redirecting its potential future users into a Facebook-curated walled-garden. Growth is required for Facebook, and India is a clear growth area, China having been largely ruled off-limits by the Chinese government. A toehold in one of the most populous countries on the planet. Has to have the Facebook board salivating.

salgernon 11y ago

I think this could all be resolved by letting Facebook pay the cost, but if they're going to restrict where you can go, require that they are restricting it to a competitor. Twitter maybe? lesswrong? And first level outgoing links from those sources.