8 ms·

Internet.org will finish internet the way we know it, hurt India’s growth

99 points by akbarnama 12y ago

pen2l 12y ago
Expected nothing less from our Zuckerberg. NSA at least makes the pretense of seeming hands off when fucking over people, Zuck just doesn't give a shit. Anyway - what can we actually do to stop this? Anything? Clearly this is the beginning of something unthinkably bad, and we should do absolutely anything to stop this.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
funkyy 12y ago
I must say this is very interesting pont of view - eye opener. When we will get a company that will actually shove all those nasty corpo style companies under the rug and actually improve web?
chucksmart 12y ago
An information oligarchy may be the single source of truth.
dreamdu5t 12y ago
What's wrong with this? They're not preventing you from paying for Internet access, they're offering some access for free. People in India are free to start competing ISPs.
- sumitviii 12y ago
  ISP's have to buy license from government. But a HN post showed a way to tunnel normal traffic through FB chat[]. :https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9203946 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9203946
  - dreamdu5t 12y ago
    Neither Facebook or Reliance Communications Ltd prevent anyone from obtaining those licenses.
- nitrogen 12y ago
  See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_%28pricing_policy%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_%28pricing_policy%29 for one example of how giving something away for free can be net worse for the economy/world than charging a fair price for it. Another issue is what is given for free. If free access is given to something that is 80% of what they need, people will have reduced incentive to buy 100%, shrinking the market for the 100% solution, raising its price, and keeping it out of reach of most people. As an analogy, giving people free low quality food could discourage them from high quality food, and the lack of market for good food could drive up its price further.
  - gojomo 12y ago
    If you're swayed by that logic, should perhaps Google be forced to charge users for web search, and Android, and their other "free" offerings that put smaller competitors at a disadvantage?
    - captn3m0 12y ago
      The difference here is that of "service" and "utility". Google can offer its services for free. However, it should not be allowed to partner with a utility to make its services free, if that makes sense.
    - adventured 12y ago
      You won't get a response to that, for the same reason you won't get a response to: should all Linux vendors be forced to charge prices comparable to Windows, because otherwise they're dumping? And of course OpenOffice should be made illegal under that same logic.
      - pmontra 12y ago
        They also give you the source code. That makes the whole issue so different that I won't use Linux and OO as an analogy for this Indian case.
    - simonh 12y ago
- cookiecide 12y ago
  Basic telecommunications infrastructure in India is heavily regulated by a government that once actually proposed banning all VoIP services apart from the ones they offer at premium prices. Thanks to a high degree of corruption and bureaucracy, it is near impossible to enter the ISP game unless you have serious monetary or political clout. Simply starting a competing ISP is not really feasible.
  - eklavya 12y ago
    Sure it is, Beam telecom (ACT now), You broadband, Spectranet (citycom now, although it is older). If you are implying that serious investment is required to setup the infrastructure, you are correct. This is the nature of the telecom game.
    - cookiecide 12y ago
      Fair enough. I suppose it is more accurate to claim that entering a business with high infrastructural costs is not possible for most people (where will the money come from?) and my guess is that only a small number of people who are in a position to start such a business would actually know and care about net neutrality.
  - dreamdu5t 12y ago
    Reliance Communications Ltd must pay those entry costs as well. I don't see why that's relevant to my point at all.
    - cookiecide 12y ago
      Reliance Communications Ltd is an arm of one of the largest companies in India, and one of a very very small number of players who can actually not only afford the entry cost, but actually outspend the competition. I understand that they aren't actively preventing people from competing with them, but it's not much of a stretch to imagine the other big players in Indian telecom following suit, resulting not in fast and slow lanes, but toll free and toll collected lanes. I don't think anyone's saying that Reliance is impinging on the freedom of others to compete with them as an ISP, they're objecting to life being more difficult for internet-based businesses that want to get off the ground without paying a fee to ISPs to get them on the toll free lanes.
- simonh 12y ago
  You're couching your defence of this in free market terms, but the truth is that for customers of this ISP these web sites no longer exist in a free market for Internet services. They have managed to skew the market in their favour by artificially lowering the overall cost of using their services and artificially raising the cost of connecting to competing services. You can't have your free market cake on one end of the argument and eat it on the other. Either you're in favour of free markets at both ends, or you aren't. Yes there is a market for ISP access and consumers are free to chose another. That's fair. Nobody is arguing this is illegal, it not even necessarily immoral for the people that made the deal. It's just business and companies give away freebies all the time for all sorts of reasons. The problem comes if this becomes standard practice, because at that point you don't have an open market anymore, you have an industry cartel that has stitched up the market to divide it up between themselves. See Adam Smith for why this is bad and why, in order to operate equitably and in the public interest, markets need to be regulated in order to remain free.
  - dreamdu5t 12y ago
    > no longer exist in a free market for Internet services How so? Anybody is free to start an ISP that doesn't do this. The existence of this ISP does not prevent anyone from starting their own. There is absolutely a free market in ISPs, and the only thing that would prevent a competing ISP is the government (by denying a license) - not Reliance Communications Ltd > They have managed to skew the market in their favour by artificially lowering the overall cost of using their services and artificially raising the cost of connecting to competing services. There's nothing artificial about it. McDonald's selling a burger for $1 doesn't prevent anyone from selling burgers at that price or a lower price. If McDonald's gives burgers away for free, that does not prevent anyone else from doing the same. > You can't have your free market cake on one end of the argument and eat it on the other. I'm not sure what you mean by free market as you use the term. The fact that its hard to compete against McDonalds (or Reliance Communications) doesn't mean others aren't free to compete. > you have an industry cartel that has stitched up the market to divide it up between themselves. Yet other investors and entrepreneurs are free to eat their lunch... unless gasp consumers actually like what they're being offered more than the alternatives you're personally interested in.
fit2rule 12y ago
Seems like we need a return of the BBS ethos, where anyone can put up some bandwidth and invite folks to join in the party for free. Perhaps internet.org is only going to create a new market for Internet provision that will be 'easy' to enter. Let them get their chained masses, then roll out a normal ISP with wide open doors. (Of course, this would depend on the ability to actually get Internet in the area .. and assumes they don't have peer licensing all wrapped up somehow.) And then there is this age-old fact, which hasn't really gone away in spite of Zucks' efforts: The Internet perceives toll-booths as damage, and routes around them. Here's hoping there will be "peers on the ground" who will fight this battle from there, too.
hardcandy 12y ago
This will not end well for Facebook. Once you start competing like this, you quit competing with innovation and eventually end up losing to someone else.
- amirmc 12y ago
  FB (& Google) have reached a size where one of the ways to keep growing is to bring more people onto the Internet. If they can do that in a way that puts their product front-and-centre for those 'new' users, they can capture more of the market. I'm not saying I approve of this strategy, but I can see it as being a viable one for now (just as AOL was viable for its time).
woodman 12y ago
This is such a horrible idea, I don't even know where to start. I'm not even worried about the long term consequences of this service, it is going to fail gloriously. How do I know this? Because it has has happened so many times before. Anybody remember long distance? That is what this is - and it might be the funniest thing I've seen all week. Thanks for the laugh Zuckerberg.
mattxxx 12y ago
This article is phrased very awkwardly. It reads like giving away free access to certain sites, is the same as making premium internet access. Am I missing something? Facebook hate aside, this is a change meant to give something away. Right?
- Harimwakairi 12y ago
  Ask Netscape how they feel about Microsoft giving Internet Explorer away.
  - tedunangst 12y ago
    Ask Microsoft how they feel about Linus giving Linux away.
    - kamaal 12y ago
      Giving away IE for free hasn't worked that well for Microsoft anyway. Open Source communities giving away *BSD's and Linux for free has been disastrous for Microsoft, on the longer run. Android and iOS have eaten Microsoft's lunch big time.
  - pmontra 12y ago
    Netscape wa giving its browser away for free too. I remember I was downloading it from netscape.com without paying. What made Microsoft subject to an antitrust investigation was bundling IE with Windows. MS lost the case but too late for Netscape. To answer another reply to your post, that's also the difference with Linus distributing Linux for free. No bundling. Furthermore there is the open source vs closed source issue which is no small difference too.
    - avemuri 12y ago
      They made it free in response to Microsoft and refocused on monetizing servers.
      - 12y ago
curiously 12y ago
I don't get it, it is free, and worried about being charged to access it beyond the free version?
- detaro 12y ago
  More "worried about what happens to those sites that can't be accessed for free". If a large number of your potential customers can only access a few sites or have financial incentive to only access them, you are now forced to conduct business through them (and good luck launching a competitor).
random_coder 12y ago
I'm Indian and I'm deeply frustrated and disappointed with this. My fear is that other mobile networks like Airtel will pick up dumb ass half-baked ideas like this and start charging for data from other non approved sources and for high cost paid wireless Internet to become the norm. I know Reliance is way too greedy, but this really is a new low. While wireless data costs in other countries are coming down, here we see the opposite trend. Fucking disgusting.
- _jgdh 12y ago
  As a fellow Indian, I'd find that frustrating too. Think of the alternative - suppose the government or judiciary finds this practice illegal and outlaws it. Imagine how unlikely this is and even if it does happen, how much bad press would be generated about "job-killing License Raj" etc.
  - kamaal 12y ago
    >>how much bad press would be generated about "job-killing License Raj" etc. I'm amazed many Indians still fall for this. The current day telecommunications companies came into being like knights in shining armor, to fight the decades of rot and stagnation in the ecosystem due to BSNL in the early 2000's. Now their whole business is being disrupted in the same way, they disrupted BSNL's business. Price innovation, innovation in customer service and making services accessible to every one at affordable prices. Now when they are being given a dose of their own medicine, they want the government to come in and have regulations to save them. Funny how capitalism works when you are at the receiving end. If these people aren't stopped now they will let things stagnate and rot for the next half century. We all know how well that worked out.
  - cookiecide 12y ago
    Regardless of the press, a level playing field would in fact be a boon for upcoming businesses. Bad press is inevitable - look at the recent uproar in the US over net neutrality. There are still some people who want to make it look like the FCC is somehow restricting private enterprise which is A Bad Thing.
- 12y ago
snyp 12y ago
i think its great for people who don't have access to the internet especially poorer sections but they should've included better sites for learning expanding their knowlege etc.
eklavya 12y ago
Maybe I misunderstood. But I think the alarm bells are pre-mature. You HAVE to pay for internet access, what this announcements says is that if you visit some websites you will not be charged. How is it any bad? The websites are paying the telecom company to bear the cost of the traffic. The customer, like always, is bearing the cost of traffic to internet.
- thawkins 12y ago
  If you are a startup trying to compete with any of those 38 sites, thrn you start with a massive disadvantage. Zuckerberg is essentialy creating a massive walled garden where the walls are held in place by economic pressure.
  - x0x0 12y ago
    but are people better off or worse? Should fb be forced to subsidize access to competitors? Does India have an effective internet access monopoly (occasionally a duopoly) ala the us, which is why I supported fcc regulations?
    - danielam 12y ago
      This. I favor net neutrality, but I think much of the "moral outrage" comes from a combination of paternalism, self-serving attitudes and petty, pampered middle class arrogance and not a discerning realism. Vacuous and self-righteous sloganeering do not impress me. Luxuries are not a given. The question that should be asked (which you bring up) from the position of those who receive the service: does it help or hurt them in the here-and-now? Are they better or worse off, on the whole, than they would have been without the service? I also presume this service is being offered in a relatively free market.
  - eklavya 12y ago
    It's not like people will stop getting an internet connection. They will still have it. They will open other websites as well. The traffic from a particular website is not significant anyway so I don't think they will go to/prefer websites with free access only. Facebook right now has no competition, they would have used it anyway and it something better comes along people won't care about the few MBs/month it costs them. ISPs have already been giving free WhatsApp plans and all, nothing changed for telegram et al I suppose.
gojomo 12y ago
Death of the net predicted! But the Internet defeated walled gardens before, because people actively chose "the whole shebang" over AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, etcetera. And, continuing improvements in networking keep making it easier, at the margin, to just offer everything. Any fixed-menu-of-N-services, even if regularly updated, will be blatantly missing some emerging content or app that friends are talking about. That will drive people to upgrade to (or creatively tunnel!) to the real, full Internet as soon as they're technically or financially able. And that ability arrives fast, given whetted appetites, social pressures, and the rapid progress in networking tech. Don't panic. Build. Any net barrier that's just a matter of puny business models will be temporary, and melt away from competition & Moore's Law. Watch out, instead, for the net barriers enforced by ideologues with badges & guns. Those blockades can hold out against technological and economic forces much longer.
pskittle 12y ago
It's understandable that Facebook needs partners to execute their vision of connecting people. I'm rooting that they end up succeeding, but if its through restricting people with low incomes to services which the connected masses don't normally use (Bing) it sux.
pranayairan 12y ago
this will create a rat race, there will be big companies like flipkart paytm willing to offer money to Reliance to offer there sites for free. Internet.org is on a path to destroy net neutrality. Reliance has just found 1 way to earn more money without any ethics.
- captn3m0 12y ago
  Yeah, flipkart came to my mind instantly as well. If internet.org really wants to help improve the state of internet, just subsidize internet as a utility.
captn3m0 12y ago
Also relevant: internet.org (within India) redirects to 0.internet.org, which takes me to 0.internet.org/unavailable with the following message: >You must be on the Reliance network to use Internet.org. If you'd like to access these websites for free, use a SIM card from Reliance. This is really getting out of hand. Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/2x1vWZr.png http://i.imgur.com/2x1vWZr.png
- jotm 12y ago
  It's available from outside India, but not on a paid connection from within? Ridiculous, indeed...
- eklavya 12y ago
  I don't know what internet.org is for. But it's such a braindead move for them. I won't (and I bet a lot many Indians) switch to the shittiest network in India just for some website. I will find alternatives to the website.
jcoffland 12y ago
This is the same as the net neutrality issue. Some of the animals are more equal than the others.
venomsnake 12y ago
And that is why we need dumb pipes.
amarjeet 12y ago
My interpretation is that the data count for the proposed sites would not be included in the internet plan that a consumer might have taken. It might have some impact on internet pack pricing, but competition should be able to correct it. I don't see any hit on the net neutrality; as of now, it simply appears like a freemium model.
anon4 12y ago
HOF (HTTP over Facebook) when?
- anon4 12y ago
  Thinking about it a bit more, if Facebook messages are themselves free, you can set up a fake facebook account and run a desktop client which acts on special messages, in effect achieving TCP over XMPP. This is probably no more than a week of work for one motivated developer. Or, given that wikipedia is free, you could use a private talk page to transmit data too. That could be even faster for individual files. Post a message to the talk page which a daemon polls frequently, then replaces the talk page with a base-64 encoding of the content you requested. Both of those require you to have a machine with unrestricted internet access, but I imagine unrestricted home internet access to be much cheaper than mobile internet.
  - rakoo 12y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9203946 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9203946 Unsurprisingly, the need was raised from the same "internet.org" bullshit.
fiatjaf 12y ago
People using this service will not consider it (or even call it) "internet", so it will not hurt the internet.
ishadua 12y ago
i think the alarm bells are a little unfounded. The internet.org initiative is to connect people who are not in the internet grid. Take a moment and think about who those people are. Do they use Saas, would they care to read a critically analyzed piece written by a journalist? The ones taking Saas subscriptions, writing/reading blogs are already connected and in the internet ambit. I cant clearly see the relation between Reliance Jio and India's growth. And moreover, the idea of giving free internet will not be sustaiable. Hope it makes sense.
Sami_Lehtinen 12y ago
I think this is good. Actually if I don't remember wrong this kind of 0 plan is already available if Finland for Facebook on at least one operator. As far as I can see there are no downsides. Access to listed sites can save lives.
iwwr 12y ago
Doesn't the culture of free web services actually create some of the perverse incentives at play in Google, Facebook and others today? The paying customers become advertisers and data miners and users are relegated to giving up their information (and potentially: future freedom). If people paid for these services, internet companies would see them as customers to serve rather than personal data to sell and exploit.

99 points by akbarnama 12y ago

pen2l 12y ago

Expected nothing less from our Zuckerberg. NSA at least makes the pretense of seeming hands off when fucking over people, Zuck just doesn't give a shit. Anyway - what can we actually do to stop this? Anything? Clearly this is the beginning of something unthinkably bad, and we should do absolutely anything to stop this.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

funkyy 12y ago

I must say this is very interesting pont of view - eye opener. When we will get a company that will actually shove all those nasty corpo style companies under the rug and actually improve web?

chucksmart 12y ago

An information oligarchy may be the single source of truth.

dreamdu5t 12y ago

What's wrong with this? They're not preventing you from paying for Internet access, they're offering some access for free. People in India are free to start competing ISPs.

sumitviii 12y ago
ISP's have to buy license from government. But a HN post showed a way to tunnel normal traffic through FB chat[]. :https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9203946 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9203946
- dreamdu5t 12y ago
  Neither Facebook or Reliance Communications Ltd prevent anyone from obtaining those licenses.
nitrogen 12y ago
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_%28pricing_policy%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_%28pricing_policy%29 for one example of how giving something away for free can be net worse for the economy/world than charging a fair price for it. Another issue is what is given for free. If free access is given to something that is 80% of what they need, people will have reduced incentive to buy 100%, shrinking the market for the 100% solution, raising its price, and keeping it out of reach of most people. As an analogy, giving people free low quality food could discourage them from high quality food, and the lack of market for good food could drive up its price further.
- gojomo 12y ago
  If you're swayed by that logic, should perhaps Google be forced to charge users for web search, and Android, and their other "free" offerings that put smaller competitors at a disadvantage?
  - captn3m0 12y ago
    The difference here is that of "service" and "utility". Google can offer its services for free. However, it should not be allowed to partner with a utility to make its services free, if that makes sense.
  - adventured 12y ago
    You won't get a response to that, for the same reason you won't get a response to: should all Linux vendors be forced to charge prices comparable to Windows, because otherwise they're dumping? And of course OpenOffice should be made illegal under that same logic.
    - pmontra 12y ago
      They also give you the source code. That makes the whole issue so different that I won't use Linux and OO as an analogy for this Indian case.
  - simonh 12y ago
cookiecide 12y ago
Basic telecommunications infrastructure in India is heavily regulated by a government that once actually proposed banning all VoIP services apart from the ones they offer at premium prices. Thanks to a high degree of corruption and bureaucracy, it is near impossible to enter the ISP game unless you have serious monetary or political clout. Simply starting a competing ISP is not really feasible.
- eklavya 12y ago
  Sure it is, Beam telecom (ACT now), You broadband, Spectranet (citycom now, although it is older). If you are implying that serious investment is required to setup the infrastructure, you are correct. This is the nature of the telecom game.
  - cookiecide 12y ago
    Fair enough. I suppose it is more accurate to claim that entering a business with high infrastructural costs is not possible for most people (where will the money come from?) and my guess is that only a small number of people who are in a position to start such a business would actually know and care about net neutrality.
- dreamdu5t 12y ago
  Reliance Communications Ltd must pay those entry costs as well. I don't see why that's relevant to my point at all.
  - cookiecide 12y ago
    Reliance Communications Ltd is an arm of one of the largest companies in India, and one of a very very small number of players who can actually not only afford the entry cost, but actually outspend the competition. I understand that they aren't actively preventing people from competing with them, but it's not much of a stretch to imagine the other big players in Indian telecom following suit, resulting not in fast and slow lanes, but toll free and toll collected lanes. I don't think anyone's saying that Reliance is impinging on the freedom of others to compete with them as an ISP, they're objecting to life being more difficult for internet-based businesses that want to get off the ground without paying a fee to ISPs to get them on the toll free lanes.
simonh 12y ago
You're couching your defence of this in free market terms, but the truth is that for customers of this ISP these web sites no longer exist in a free market for Internet services. They have managed to skew the market in their favour by artificially lowering the overall cost of using their services and artificially raising the cost of connecting to competing services. You can't have your free market cake on one end of the argument and eat it on the other. Either you're in favour of free markets at both ends, or you aren't. Yes there is a market for ISP access and consumers are free to chose another. That's fair. Nobody is arguing this is illegal, it not even necessarily immoral for the people that made the deal. It's just business and companies give away freebies all the time for all sorts of reasons. The problem comes if this becomes standard practice, because at that point you don't have an open market anymore, you have an industry cartel that has stitched up the market to divide it up between themselves. See Adam Smith for why this is bad and why, in order to operate equitably and in the public interest, markets need to be regulated in order to remain free.
- dreamdu5t 12y ago
  > no longer exist in a free market for Internet services How so? Anybody is free to start an ISP that doesn't do this. The existence of this ISP does not prevent anyone from starting their own. There is absolutely a free market in ISPs, and the only thing that would prevent a competing ISP is the government (by denying a license) - not Reliance Communications Ltd > They have managed to skew the market in their favour by artificially lowering the overall cost of using their services and artificially raising the cost of connecting to competing services. There's nothing artificial about it. McDonald's selling a burger for $1 doesn't prevent anyone from selling burgers at that price or a lower price. If McDonald's gives burgers away for free, that does not prevent anyone else from doing the same. > You can't have your free market cake on one end of the argument and eat it on the other. I'm not sure what you mean by free market as you use the term. The fact that its hard to compete against McDonalds (or Reliance Communications) doesn't mean others aren't free to compete. > you have an industry cartel that has stitched up the market to divide it up between themselves. Yet other investors and entrepreneurs are free to eat their lunch... unless gasp consumers actually like what they're being offered more than the alternatives you're personally interested in.

fit2rule 12y ago

Seems like we need a return of the BBS ethos, where anyone can put up some bandwidth and invite folks to join in the party for free. Perhaps internet.org is only going to create a new market for Internet provision that will be 'easy' to enter. Let them get their chained masses, then roll out a normal ISP with wide open doors. (Of course, this would depend on the ability to actually get Internet in the area .. and assumes they don't have peer licensing all wrapped up somehow.) And then there is this age-old fact, which hasn't really gone away in spite of Zucks' efforts: The Internet perceives toll-booths as damage, and routes around them. Here's hoping there will be "peers on the ground" who will fight this battle from there, too.

hardcandy 12y ago

This will not end well for Facebook. Once you start competing like this, you quit competing with innovation and eventually end up losing to someone else.

amirmc 12y ago
FB (& Google) have reached a size where one of the ways to keep growing is to bring more people onto the Internet. If they can do that in a way that puts their product front-and-centre for those 'new' users, they can capture more of the market. I'm not saying I approve of this strategy, but I can see it as being a viable one for now (just as AOL was viable for its time).

woodman 12y ago

This is such a horrible idea, I don't even know where to start. I'm not even worried about the long term consequences of this service, it is going to fail gloriously. How do I know this? Because it has has happened so many times before. Anybody remember long distance? That is what this is - and it might be the funniest thing I've seen all week. Thanks for the laugh Zuckerberg.

mattxxx 12y ago

This article is phrased very awkwardly. It reads like giving away free access to certain sites, is the same as making premium internet access. Am I missing something? Facebook hate aside, this is a change meant to give something away. Right?

Harimwakairi 12y ago
Ask Netscape how they feel about Microsoft giving Internet Explorer away.
- tedunangst 12y ago
  Ask Microsoft how they feel about Linus giving Linux away.
  - kamaal 12y ago
    Giving away IE for free hasn't worked that well for Microsoft anyway. Open Source communities giving away *BSD's and Linux for free has been disastrous for Microsoft, on the longer run. Android and iOS have eaten Microsoft's lunch big time.
- pmontra 12y ago
  Netscape wa giving its browser away for free too. I remember I was downloading it from netscape.com without paying. What made Microsoft subject to an antitrust investigation was bundling IE with Windows. MS lost the case but too late for Netscape. To answer another reply to your post, that's also the difference with Linus distributing Linux for free. No bundling. Furthermore there is the open source vs closed source issue which is no small difference too.
  - avemuri 12y ago
    They made it free in response to Microsoft and refocused on monetizing servers.
    - 12y ago

curiously 12y ago

I don't get it, it is free, and worried about being charged to access it beyond the free version?

detaro 12y ago
More "worried about what happens to those sites that can't be accessed for free". If a large number of your potential customers can only access a few sites or have financial incentive to only access them, you are now forced to conduct business through them (and good luck launching a competitor).

random_coder 12y ago

I'm Indian and I'm deeply frustrated and disappointed with this. My fear is that other mobile networks like Airtel will pick up dumb ass half-baked ideas like this and start charging for data from other non approved sources and for high cost paid wireless Internet to become the norm. I know Reliance is way too greedy, but this really is a new low. While wireless data costs in other countries are coming down, here we see the opposite trend. Fucking disgusting.

_jgdh 12y ago
As a fellow Indian, I'd find that frustrating too. Think of the alternative - suppose the government or judiciary finds this practice illegal and outlaws it. Imagine how unlikely this is and even if it does happen, how much bad press would be generated about "job-killing License Raj" etc.
- kamaal 12y ago
  >>how much bad press would be generated about "job-killing License Raj" etc. I'm amazed many Indians still fall for this. The current day telecommunications companies came into being like knights in shining armor, to fight the decades of rot and stagnation in the ecosystem due to BSNL in the early 2000's. Now their whole business is being disrupted in the same way, they disrupted BSNL's business. Price innovation, innovation in customer service and making services accessible to every one at affordable prices. Now when they are being given a dose of their own medicine, they want the government to come in and have regulations to save them. Funny how capitalism works when you are at the receiving end. If these people aren't stopped now they will let things stagnate and rot for the next half century. We all know how well that worked out.
- cookiecide 12y ago
  Regardless of the press, a level playing field would in fact be a boon for upcoming businesses. Bad press is inevitable - look at the recent uproar in the US over net neutrality. There are still some people who want to make it look like the FCC is somehow restricting private enterprise which is A Bad Thing.
12y ago

snyp 12y ago

i think its great for people who don't have access to the internet especially poorer sections but they should've included better sites for learning expanding their knowlege etc.

eklavya 12y ago

Maybe I misunderstood. But I think the alarm bells are pre-mature. You HAVE to pay for internet access, what this announcements says is that if you visit some websites you will not be charged. How is it any bad? The websites are paying the telecom company to bear the cost of the traffic. The customer, like always, is bearing the cost of traffic to internet.

thawkins 12y ago
If you are a startup trying to compete with any of those 38 sites, thrn you start with a massive disadvantage. Zuckerberg is essentialy creating a massive walled garden where the walls are held in place by economic pressure.
- x0x0 12y ago
  but are people better off or worse? Should fb be forced to subsidize access to competitors? Does India have an effective internet access monopoly (occasionally a duopoly) ala the us, which is why I supported fcc regulations?
  - danielam 12y ago
    This. I favor net neutrality, but I think much of the "moral outrage" comes from a combination of paternalism, self-serving attitudes and petty, pampered middle class arrogance and not a discerning realism. Vacuous and self-righteous sloganeering do not impress me. Luxuries are not a given. The question that should be asked (which you bring up) from the position of those who receive the service: does it help or hurt them in the here-and-now? Are they better or worse off, on the whole, than they would have been without the service? I also presume this service is being offered in a relatively free market.
- eklavya 12y ago
  It's not like people will stop getting an internet connection. They will still have it. They will open other websites as well. The traffic from a particular website is not significant anyway so I don't think they will go to/prefer websites with free access only. Facebook right now has no competition, they would have used it anyway and it something better comes along people won't care about the few MBs/month it costs them. ISPs have already been giving free WhatsApp plans and all, nothing changed for telegram et al I suppose.

gojomo 12y ago

Death of the net predicted! But the Internet defeated walled gardens before, because people actively chose "the whole shebang" over AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, etcetera. And, continuing improvements in networking keep making it easier, at the margin, to just offer everything. Any fixed-menu-of-N-services, even if regularly updated, will be blatantly missing some emerging content or app that friends are talking about. That will drive people to upgrade to (or creatively tunnel!) to the real, full Internet as soon as they're technically or financially able. And that ability arrives fast, given whetted appetites, social pressures, and the rapid progress in networking tech. Don't panic. Build. Any net barrier that's just a matter of puny business models will be temporary, and melt away from competition & Moore's Law. Watch out, instead, for the net barriers enforced by ideologues with badges & guns. Those blockades can hold out against technological and economic forces much longer.

pskittle 12y ago

It's understandable that Facebook needs partners to execute their vision of connecting people. I'm rooting that they end up succeeding, but if its through restricting people with low incomes to services which the connected masses don't normally use (Bing) it sux.

pranayairan 12y ago

this will create a rat race, there will be big companies like flipkart paytm willing to offer money to Reliance to offer there sites for free. Internet.org is on a path to destroy net neutrality. Reliance has just found 1 way to earn more money without any ethics.

captn3m0 12y ago
Yeah, flipkart came to my mind instantly as well. If internet.org really wants to help improve the state of internet, just subsidize internet as a utility.

captn3m0 12y ago

Also relevant: internet.org (within India) redirects to 0.internet.org, which takes me to 0.internet.org/unavailable with the following message: >You must be on the Reliance network to use Internet.org. If you'd like to access these websites for free, use a SIM card from Reliance. This is really getting out of hand. Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/2x1vWZr.png http://i.imgur.com/2x1vWZr.png

jotm 12y ago
It's available from outside India, but not on a paid connection from within? Ridiculous, indeed...
eklavya 12y ago
I don't know what internet.org is for. But it's such a braindead move for them. I won't (and I bet a lot many Indians) switch to the shittiest network in India just for some website. I will find alternatives to the website.

jcoffland 12y ago

This is the same as the net neutrality issue. Some of the animals are more equal than the others.

venomsnake 12y ago

And that is why we need dumb pipes.

amarjeet 12y ago

My interpretation is that the data count for the proposed sites would not be included in the internet plan that a consumer might have taken. It might have some impact on internet pack pricing, but competition should be able to correct it. I don't see any hit on the net neutrality; as of now, it simply appears like a freemium model.

anon4 12y ago

HOF (HTTP over Facebook) when?

anon4 12y ago
Thinking about it a bit more, if Facebook messages are themselves free, you can set up a fake facebook account and run a desktop client which acts on special messages, in effect achieving TCP over XMPP. This is probably no more than a week of work for one motivated developer. Or, given that wikipedia is free, you could use a private talk page to transmit data too. That could be even faster for individual files. Post a message to the talk page which a daemon polls frequently, then replaces the talk page with a base-64 encoding of the content you requested. Both of those require you to have a machine with unrestricted internet access, but I imagine unrestricted home internet access to be much cheaper than mobile internet.
- rakoo 12y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9203946 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9203946 Unsurprisingly, the need was raised from the same "internet.org" bullshit.

fiatjaf 12y ago

People using this service will not consider it (or even call it) "internet", so it will not hurt the internet.

ishadua 12y ago

i think the alarm bells are a little unfounded. The internet.org initiative is to connect people who are not in the internet grid. Take a moment and think about who those people are. Do they use Saas, would they care to read a critically analyzed piece written by a journalist? The ones taking Saas subscriptions, writing/reading blogs are already connected and in the internet ambit. I cant clearly see the relation between Reliance Jio and India's growth. And moreover, the idea of giving free internet will not be sustaiable. Hope it makes sense.

Sami_Lehtinen 12y ago

I think this is good. Actually if I don't remember wrong this kind of 0 plan is already available if Finland for Facebook on at least one operator. As far as I can see there are no downsides. Access to listed sites can save lives.

iwwr 12y ago

Doesn't the culture of free web services actually create some of the perverse incentives at play in Google, Facebook and others today? The paying customers become advertisers and data miners and users are relegated to giving up their information (and potentially: future freedom). If people paid for these services, internet companies would see them as customers to serve rather than personal data to sell and exploit.