The thing is: how does banning Free Basics / Internet.org provide that?
That's what bothers me about this movement: it should be about giving poor people free access to the Net (which would just render Facebook's toy platform irrelevant - no need to ban it).
Today a bunch of activists are celebrating victory, but tomorrow the poor will still have no Internet access. It's hard not to feel like these campaigns are little more than middle-class people patting themselves on the back.
> That's what bothers me about this movement: it should be about giving poor people free access to the Net (which would just render Facebook's toy platform irrelevant - no need to ban it).
Give access to the whole Internet and not just few specific sites which a megacorp has full control over. The whole argument of something-is-better-than-nothing sounds so much like 18th century colonists. I just don't get why should Facebook be allowed to give so much power without them investing even a penny to improve the infrastructure.
Google's Project Loon is worth applauding, Free Basics is just a ploy to get the next billion users branded as a charity.
The point is that Free Basics existing would automatically remove a huge amount of incentive for other solutions appearing. Why bother building a better internet if FB already provides "the essentials" to everyone? It would wipe the market before it had a chance to develop organically as it happened elsewhere. If AOL had provided free access to its own services only we would have a very different network today.
CompuServe never had the volume and appeal FB has today. Minitel is a good reference because it is widely credited as one of the reasons France initially experienced slow internet uptake.
> That's what bothers me about this movement: it should be about giving poor people free access to the Net (which would just render Facebook's toy platform irrelevant - no need to ban it).
You are assuming that Free Basics is the only way poor people are getting connected. There are several more initiatives, funded both by the public and private. Banning Free Basics ensures that we don't differentiate internet based on an individual's affordability.
You are assuming that Free Basics is the only way poor people are getting connected. There are several more initiatives, funded both by the public and private.
No, I'm saying that the campaign has been against-Free-Basics and not pro-free-Internet. If there are such initiatives, good! Then nobody will have a reason to subscribe to Free Basics, and it'll fail anyway.
Banning Free Basics ensures that we don't differentiate internet based on an individual's affordability.
But if there are free plans with full Internet access, why is that important?
> but tomorrow the poor will still have no Internet access
That would still be the case if the verdict was the other way around. There's no evidence that Free Basics actually brought a significant number of new people on the internet (the rate of people cited as joining Free Basics is comparable to the rate of people joining the internet in general, so it didn't change anything)
Note that data plans are pretty cheap in India. The cost of a smartphone that can handle modern websites (especially Facebook, which breaks on old/slow phones and browsers) is more than the cost of a few year's worth of data.
Cheap enough for the 60% of rural Indians who live on less than 35 Rs/day [1]?
> The cost of a smartphone that can handle modern websites (especially Facebook, which breaks on old/slow phones and browsers) is more than the cost of a few year's worth of data.
The vast majority of mobile phones in India are feature phones which are considerably cheaper than smartphones [2]. To be included in Free Basics, sites have to work reasonably on feature phones. Free Basics sites are accessed through a proxy which modifies requests so that the sites can tell that they are being viewed by a Free Basics user, and so the site can present a version that works without requiring "modern" features like JavaScript, SVG images and WOFF font types, iframes, video and large images, or Flash and Java applets.
> Cheap enough for the 60% of rural Indians who live on less than 35 Rs/day [1]?
Perhaps not; but I was including only people who can afford the phone.
> The vast majority of mobile phones in India are feature phones which are considerably cheaper than smartphones
They're still ~Rs 1k (you can get cheaper ones, but I don't think even proxied sites will work well on these). Monthly data plans are less than a tenth of this.
IIRC Free Basics' Facebook still needed a good phone (higher end feature phone or a smartphone), but I can't verify that right now.
And that really brings us back to the question; how is this bringing people to the Internet? Even if Facebook worked well on a Rs 400 phone, only the Free Basics sites would work well there. This just underlines that Facebook is trying to give people Free Facebook, nothing more. People who cannot afford these phones would not become "Digital Indians" by using Free Basics, they would use Facebook and only Facebook.
That would still be the case if the verdict was the other way around.
That's my point: there's nothing to celebrate here, as nothing as changed. People without full Internet access still don't have it. And so, for what is the post thanking a lot of people?
The thing is: how does banning Free Basics / Internet.org provide that?
That's what bothers me about this movement: it should be about giving poor people free access to the Net (which would just render Facebook's toy platform irrelevant - no need to ban it).
Today a bunch of activists are celebrating victory, but tomorrow the poor will still have no Internet access. It's hard not to feel like these campaigns are little more than middle-class people patting themselves on the back.