>Part of this is that people who have never been online before don't understand the value of getting online. Yes, and therefore they will understand even less,

>Part of this is that people who have never been online before don't understand the value of getting online. Yes, and therefore they will understand even less, the value of the whole Internet as opposed to selected sites. So it is misleading. >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). This whole thing (internet.org / Free Basics) was discussed to death in the Indian tech and even mainstream media, and also a good amount on HN (and I'm sure plenty of other general Internet discussion sites) when the topic was more current. The arguments of the people (many Indian) objecting to it boiled down to one thing: the telecoms / FB can easily give access to the whole Internet, not just their selected sites, but for a limited amount of bandwidth per month, e.g. 500 MB or 1 GB, for the same cost as their original plan, which discriminated against all other sites than their selected ones. Then why did they not try to do that? As I understand it, that is the gist of the argument against internet.org.