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So - let me get this straight - if I want to provide VoIP services to India, I'd have to make deals with all my competitors - the telecoms companies - to do so?
by vertex-four 10y ago
So - let me get this straight - if I want to provide VoIP services to India, I'd have to make deals with all my competitors - the telecoms companies - to do so? Where's their incentive to do that? What if I'm running a personal blog, or small informational site? It becomes even harder to do than today.
The Internet, as it stands, with some hiccups, allows anyone to put up a website and have the globe be able to access it. If you have to make deals with ISPs to allow their customers to see your content, or never be seen because nobody will pay for "the real Internet" as long as they have Facebook and Wikipedia and Amazon... the result of that is that the Internet becomes a means of commerce, not a means of communication. Another system by which companies and Governments and the rich can market to people, but people are silenced from criticizing them and building alternatives.
Stop twisting words - this isn't about "free Internet access", this is about free access to specific websites as chosen by the telecoms companies.
- tim333 10y agoOk - guess you have a point with that one.
- mmmBacon 10y agoNobody is restricting anything. You can still pay for Internet. It's only a free service tier. Don't forget that these are mostly 2G connections and so a full internet experience is likely to be a poor one. The limited services here are serving up lite versions of their products that should provide a better user experience on a 2G connection. Honestly this model is not too different from what we had here in the US prior to iPhone. My Verizon phone had a very limited amount of Internet connectivity that was mostly restricted to Verizon's walled garden. I could pay for more connectivity but it was not a good experience. Pages were slow loading and the whole thing was more frustrating than anything else.
- vertex-four 10y agoThe issue is that it's a free service tier which ensures that certain companies will always have the upper hand - you can be guaranteed everyone can access Facebook, you can't be guaranteed everyone can access whatever the next thing is, so Facebook wins by default. Facebook also wins vs any criticism of it. You can offer a lite version of any service on the public Internet, you don't need a free service tier.