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Ah yes, when HN decided that poor people in India shouldn't have any internet, because Facebook was providing it. To be fair though, the zero rating/internet.o
by disgruntledphd2 6y ago
Ah yes, when HN decided that poor people in India shouldn't have any internet, because Facebook was providing it.
To be fair though, the zero rating/internet.org stuff does appear to have made a massive difference to internet availability in developing countries, and it juiced FB's user growth numbers, as it was intended to do.
- krrrh 6y agoIt happened to coincide with hyperbolic campaigns around net neutrality stateside and a lot of that language got overextended to really different situations. I spent a month in Myanmar in late 2016 and different providers had different zero rating on different services. The one I went with offered generous prepaid data plans and no phone service or SMS at all, just unlimited use of Line. I was tickled by this but there were a couple of old Israeli guys in the shop where we got our SIM cards getting massively frustrated that no one could explain how many “minutes” of calling they got on the various plans. None of the staff knew what they were asking. It was just a market at a very different level of maturity, more advanced in some ways, and weirdly pragmatic in others.