7 ms·

It sounds like Facebook's approach is to provide free wifi to specific websites (which presumably includes Facebook) while Google's approach is to just provide

• rattray 10y ago
  Facebook was trying to provide free 2G/3G, not wifi. That's a lot more powerful, and a lot more expensive. A huge percentage of India lives, works, and travels in areas that are unlikely to ever be reached by Google's wifi, but most of the country is now reached by at least one telecom. EDIT: I did not mean to put Facebook forward as a hero; I wanted to explain the difference, and provide a hypothesis as to why it would be prohibitively expensive for Facebook to provide unfettered internet access in this case, but not for Google.
  • ethanbond 10y ago
    Free 2G/3G to specific websites
    • pyvpx 10y ago
      a very important distinction that needs to be mentioned every single time
  • jonknee 10y ago
    > That's a lot more powerful, and a lot more expensive. It's not more powerful when Zuck wanted to limit it to Facebook.com and whatever other sites he felt like allowing Indians to access. It was just insulting and that's why it went down in flames.
    • vram22 10y ago
      It was worse than insulting, it would have limited the people using it, to the small list of sites (compared to the whole Internet) decided by others. It's like saying to someone: here's a free communication mechanism, you can only use it to access services run by us ... and in the process, be made to view our ads willy-nilly. For Internet newbies, it also has the side effect, that many of them might not even get to know (for a while, or ever) that other / better sites existed.
    • onewaystreet 10y ago
      Why is it insulting that a company offered people limited internet access for free?
      • jonknee 10y ago
        For me it's the super transparent self interest in that you only want these poor people online so that you can count their eyeballs in your DAUs and continue hitting higher numbers for your investors. You might not find that objectionable, but I do. Apparently India does as well! It would be like McDonalds offering to feed the hungry, but only if they exclusively ate McDonalds food. Yes they are hungry, but no they should not only be eating McDonalds food.
  • findjashua 10y ago
    free wifi to ALL websites >> free 2g/3g to a select few
  • tener 10y ago
    For rural areas they intend to use baloons. I'd say there are no major gaps in their plan.
  • Ar-Curunir 10y ago
    Free 2G/3G for access to Facebook's walled garden that doesn't allow https
    • dingdongding 10y ago
      It did allow https. They weren't blocking https.
      • Ar-Curunir 10y ago
        Well meaningful https. Their plans were to MITM the connection.
      • r3bl 10y ago
        They basically wanted to serve as a middleman between you and your visitors. They use a "dual certificate" model, where they encrypt the data between readers and their own servers with their own certificate, and then access your website through your certificate. They explain the process quite a bit when you try to submit a website to the Free Basics program. I went through the process to see how complicated it is (I got denied because I didn't want to get rid of SVGs and some JavaScript code from my website) and blogged about it here: https://blog.r3bl.me/en/why-not-everyone-can-get-involved-with-free-basics/ https://blog.r3bl.me/en/why-not-everyone-can-get-involved-wi.... Pay attention the screenshot I posted under the HTTPS Support heading.
  • _greim_ 10y ago
    Ah, thanks for the clarification.
  • linuxkerneldev 10y ago
    > A huge percentage of India lives, works, and travels in areas that are unlikely to ever be reached by Google's wifi, Please define "huge". Googling shows me that Google's wifi was setup at mass transit stations. Wikipedia says: " In 2014-15, IR carried 8.397 billion passengers annually or more than 23 million passengers a day " 23 million people a day is not a trivial number.
    • rattray 10y ago
      Given that there are fewer than 8.3 billion people on the planet, we're going to have to assume a high percentage of repeat users. If people who use IR use it on average once every ten days (most may use it daily?), you'd project 230 million people would use IR in a year. That's still only a fifth of the Indian population; I would call 80% a "huge" percentage. Really, though, the point is that nobody spends much time at railway stations (at least, not a majority of their day), so even if everybody used the wifi once, it wouldn't have a major effect on their lives. Compare that to 2G/3G, which blankets much larger swathes of land – places people actually live and work.
      • intended 10y ago
        Again, this assumes that telcos in India are actually doing their job to service these areas. Telcos begrudge the cost of servicing the rural areas, and are concentrating a majority of their data dev to help metros. The Facebook freebasic fiasco was also targetted at metros and young teens. They know which target markets would respond to free basic. The high sounding promises were rhetoric - studies on who used the data showed that the market was users who used it to connect to other facebook users for free - college students. Most of India is not educated in English, or literate - full internet which allows the sharing of images (not possible on FB) is significantly more useful. In India, IRCTC (railways website) is used a lot. so having free connectivity on a train station is actually very useful. It may not be blanket coverage but it is practical, targetted and impactful coverage. India needs more of that kind of work, because investment is slow and money hard to come by. Solving multiple use cases at one go with low resources is a great solution.
  • intended 10y ago
    That's untrue. Facebook was in no way or form trying to provide 2g/3G. Thank you for putting the point across so nicely because this is the root of all the confusion. Facebook was trying to serve a few sites via their platform. In no way was it 3G or 2g which is full internet.
    • rattray 10y ago
      > In no way was it 3G or 2g which is full internet. Free Basics was delivered over 2G/3G, instead of being delivered over wifi. I am not defending Free Basics here.
• fossuser 10y ago
  Facebook's approach is to work with the telecoms in order to have them offer a subset of the internet for free on mobile devices (notably Facebook, Wikipedia and some others). Part of this is that people who have never been online before don't understand the value of getting online. This allows them to have some access in order to better understand the value. The model is a bit like the old shareware model DOOM used - give a few levels for free and if they like it they can pay for the rest. The backlash was the argument that Zuckerberg was only giving access to a few websites (mostly Facebook) in order to get more control of the internet without following net neutrality. To me this seems to be an oversimplified and overly pessimistic view of what happened. The telecoms are not going to just give free access of the entire web to everyone, but by giving access to some valuable websites for free people may start to see the value and demand better infrastructure/start paying for mobile internet. I think Zuckerberg is being earnest here and not attempting to manipulate people for some malicious power grab - this seemed like a good approach (unfortunately the PR fallout was not). In comparison it looks like google is just setting up free wifi hotspots which requires you to go to one in order to use it and is generally a lot less useful.
  • tensor 10y ago
    Having access to the entire internet sounds a whole lot more useful than access to a subset.
    • fossuser 10y ago
      Not if you have to go ten miles and stand by the router in order to get it. Then it's really a comparison between no internet or a subset.
      • electriclove 10y ago
        Facebook could have done both (access to everything and from anywhere) but they didn't. That's their mistake...
        • 10y ago