I haven't heard stories like this about Facebook, but perhaps they're better at covering their tracks.
- Negotiation and "arrangements" with OEMs that they will only pre-install Windows on all devices.
- Allowing "selective piracy" to happen so the masses are addicted only to Windows, while they still earn from corporate clients.
- Making Word/Excel formats not compatible with ODF (Open Document Format), thus making it difficult for OpenOffice/LibreOffice to function.
If I think about it, it seems like a wonder that I even have Linux running on my laptop today!
For now, anyway.
In fact the word play now is just ridiculous. When questioned about the above, they point out that this is an open platform now where any service can come in. When questioned on why not simply give free capped bandwidth then, the answer is that "basic internet services" like education, health are more important for poor. And if left to themselves, they will spend all bandwidth on things like porn. (The last statement is not from Facebook but from certain supporters of FreeBasics)
No, not really. It's giving them an option, and they can decide for themselves.
Time to detach.
If I were you, I'd question the intentions too. The arguments have been laid out against "Free Basics" but Facebook has refused to engage the community. It continues to push its agenda forward by running dubious ad-campaigns and surveys.
This is the second time Facebook has tried something similar, after having lost the first round of battle that led to many Indians uninstalling apps and boycotting websites that supported/participated in its "internet.org" initiative.
Zuckerberg has managed to PR himself as sincere, honest, noble, altruist and what not... but that PR hasn't worked in India. He, personally, holds no sway unlike, may be, in SV.
"Free Basics" let's not kid ourselves is a move by Facebook to take control of the Internet. It already controls 4 of the most popular apps on mobile in the English speaking world (Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger); with "Free Basics" they're taking steps to ensure that dominance stays intact.
You even see Google trying to do that in a more subtle way... googleweblight, subsidized Nexus line of products, "free and open source" Android with tightly controlled ecosystem, Chrome with properiteary plug-ins, Fiber, Fi, and OnHub to quote a few.
It is not just that. The worrying thing is that they are violating net neutrality by making sure that "FB and friends" is the only thing accessible on this free internet. If Mr. Zuckerberg is that altruistic, why not provide proper full internet? Even a limited (say 500MB per person/month) internet for free is better than nothing.
But no, they want to violate net neutrality by disallowing everyone else. They don't want to provide HTTPS security, but again snoop around their user's data so monies could be made out of that. Is this altruism, Mr. Zuckerberg?
I'm surprised this isn't in headlines. Imagine the backlash if Comcast charged you to access Netflix but gave you free NBC.com streaming.
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/internet-org
> Free Basics by Facebook provides free access to basic internet services to a billion people all over the world. Your service can be part of it.
> In order to make your website display properly within the Free Basics Platform and be accessible to people on all types of phones and data plans, your mobile website(s) must meet certain technical conditions created by the Free Basics proxy. [...]
Granted, I don't know how difficult it is to get a service included, but I've seen them mention a number of times that they intend enrollment to be open to anyone. The participation page seems focused primarily on technical issues like how easy the site is to proxy and cache, in order to serve a bandwidth-light version.
> Developer participation on the Free Basics Platform, including the information submitted with your application, is otherwise governed by our standard legal terms. Collectively, our standard legal terms and these supplemental terms are the entire agreement between you and Facebook relating to Free Basics, and any terms of use for your service will not apply to Facebook.
Which essentially makes FB the gatekeeper of the internet.
It's much more likely that Zuckerberg realizes his company is overvalued, and that he needs to acquire a massive amount of users to make up for that gap.
Subsidizing a walled-garden version of the Internet where users can only use Facebook in developing countries makes strategic sense for the company.
Facebook doesn't care about "free internet", they care about building their business, and this "free basics" program makes that patently obvious. I don't blame them or necessarily think it's a bad thing , but the propaganda associated with it is ridiculous.
And these are the people whom Zuckerberg is targeting for the FreeBasics free internet program. Maybe, he thinks that socializing on FB or performing a quick google search on farming methods is going to help them, but that is far from reality and just fascinating thinking. All I know is that the millions that Mr. ZUckerberg spent on displaying FreeBasics ads in the Indian newspapers and TV channels would have been much better spent by actually donating that money to the farmers he intends to help.
*and it has nothing to do with politics. I am about as Left as it gets.
One of the things you might hope for connecting them is they could educate themselves, organise and fight back against being exploited. Maybe their kids can go online if they are illiterate themselves. That kind of thing is more likely to improve conditions than a modest amount of cash.
Basically, the recipient is the best positioned to identify what will help them improve, not some well meaning remote do-gooder.
Ref: 1. http://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/cas... 2. http://www.who.int/alliance-hpsr/alliancehpsr_dfidevidencepa...
For example, there are many in the US who are poor, but who often do not allocate the money in ways that serve their best interests, but this may largely be the result of advertisers manipulating what people think is in their best interest. But for the world's poorest, they don't have enough to be worth the investment to inundate with advertisements, so they may have better ability to decide what is in their own best interests.
Donating money directly almost never helps in the long run. I think Zuckerberg is doing what he thinks is good, and I don't think free internet to farmers will do any bad. It might help only a few and by a little amount, but that is still better than nothing. Who are we to decide how somebody else organizes their charity?
Change at a fundamental level is a good long-term goal, but do you want to make people wait 5-15 years for that, instead of getting help in the next week? Will getting free internet slow down the fundamental change?
I am not saying that donating money is always a good option, but it is better than giving free Internet least of all keeping whatsapp or facebook as a "basic" need.
Does it intend to serve ads? How does ads work? Isn't one aspect of ads involve creating needs where there were previously none? Does it involve injecting insecurities (Ex: You are a loser if you are not fair) into the minds of the gullible and make them buy buy buy...
So, what If the end result of this is that suddenly the teenage kids of these farmers starts to spend more amount of money on cosmetics (because of Ads or to make them look good in "selfies"). Will that do them good?
What? The debate about the benefits of direct cash-transfers vs. more managed forms of aid is alive and well in 2015.
> Do you think donating some money to farmers is going to help in any way? The government has been doing that for a long time (through subsidies and minimum purchase prices)
You're talking about two different things. Subsidies are different than unconditional cash transfers, the latter of which there has been recent promising research on:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconditional_cash_transfer
https://www.princeton.edu/~joha/publications/Haushofer_Shapi...
Of course it would. They could buy new, better equipment, tools, fertilizers, seeds, animals etc. My country (Lithuania) joined EU in 2004 and started direct payments to farmers via projects, that helped A LOT. Now we have big, modern cooperatives and companies that sell products worldwide instead of small, inefficient farms. What I don't understand, how could Facebook (and friends) help them? I doubt that even an unlimited Internet would be useful without an extensive education, as most older/uneducated people struggle to use even a simple cell phone.
i doubt people would want to shift to free basics from a full internet and if they do then that's what they like, its their choice. We should continue using normal broadband. Now you can argue that telcos will then overcharge for normal broadband, but who knows, they might not and even if they do then TRAI can send them a notice to not do that, and they will stop like they did with the "fast lane" thingy.
1 million: Free Basics users in India in 2015 (source: FB press release)
5.8 million: Data users acquired by Reliance, FB's sole partner in India, in 2015 (source: IAMAI)
109 million: Data users acquired by all telcos in India in 2015 (Sep 2014-Sep 2015, source: same IAMAI report)
So if Free Basics converted 50% of their users to the full Internet, that's about 500k users, or less than 0.5% of the industry's success rate.
Asking for dangerous policy exceptions because your flawed scheme has an actual success rate of 0.5% and presenting this as 50% is disingenuous at best.
In fact, 80% of FreeBasics users are EXISTING Internet users, not NEW.
But if a foreign company offers a net subsidy to access a part of the Internet shouldn't that drive down the price of Internet access for everyone? I.e. you could access "free basics" and also have a complimentary Internet subscription that could be offered at a lower price since your Facebook traffic would be subsidized.
Facebook could just as easily offer a net neutral internet, but they're not - that's what people are upset about.
Agreed. Given what we know about his history, he also seems to think that most people just aren't nearly as smart as he is... and so it's best not to confuse them, with you know, choices. And that the fact that everything they say and do within his realm is relentlessly indexed, analyzed (with literally the most advanced AI techniques money can buy), gleefully pimped out to advertisers -- and at the request of authoritarian governments, outright blocked -- is on balance, all in their best interest.
It's tragic that this is a mistake we see again and again in tech, even with the presence of anti-authority/countercultural tendencies and groups in this field.
Doesn't mean they weren't both right though.
I hear that Facebook employees don't even have such minimal guarantees as indentured servants who could reasonably expect to bw offered something other than lobster at least 4 times a week.
Zuck has brainwashed people to such a degree that they think this 'lobster' is actually good food.
I feel sure he doesn't think of it as a land grab
Does anyone recall what Zuckerberg said about the people who "trust him"?
But, has he ever apologized?
I am discontent to watch the world lay power at his feet, and proud of Indians for standing up to him.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/14/facebook_trust_dumb/
And young is when you are in your early teens, I think he was a junior in college when this happened and his frontal cortex should have been fully developed by then.
Anyone have a link to such a statement?
> Personally, I believe Zuckerberg is sincere in wanting to connect everyone in the world with each other.
I personally think you're a lobbyist or you just like Mark (I mean who wouldn't, eccentric billionaire who gave MOST of his fortune away to a good cause. How could he possibly want to make MORE money)
> But he is looking from the inside out.
Yeah, EXACTLY, ask US (poor people) what we want! --- WE want our Mellenia to use snapchat (with the effects & everything), Netflix & Chill...oh my bad, I lost my train of thought. What I wanted to say was that, WE want you people (first world) to donate to UNICEF so the starving child with a fly on his eye can eat --- that was my outside-in view.
Edit: to all the poor Indians who fought against "free basics", my upmost respect & gratitude --- I hope someday we can all Netflix & Chill instead of just pocking ;)
Or, is he desperately trying to save his company by getting the last remaining drops of users in a rapidly diminishing market for new user base?
If you think about it, Facebook is not a monopoly that it used to be in the early 2000s, even comparing it Microsoft Windows (like someone did in this thread) is an erroneous exercise.
Windows had a kind of monopoly on PC world that perhaps no other software product in the history of computing ever had. But Facebook has tonnes of alternatives. There weren't many when it began, but today we have Google-plus, twitter, Reddit, Hacker-news and lots of others. Granted that none of them is an exact replacement for FB, but then again, everything has its pros and cons, its a monopolistic competition anyways where each product in a competitive market is a monopoloy in itself.
That's not the real threat to Facebook's empire. Those are all tools used by people in their late 20s and 30s who came of age in a desktop-first world and Facebook is comfortable coexisting with them.
The thing that is a threat to Facebook long term is mobie apps like Snapchat, YikYak and other things we old farts haven't even heard of. They are used by (and represent) a new generation of truly mobile-first users for whom Facebook is something their parents ("old people") use. The biggest risk Facebook has with these users is not that it just unused, but uncool.
>I feel sure he doesn't think of it as a land grab, even privately.
why?
I believe most humans are inherently not evil even if they don't agree with me. They want to make the world a better place, and they are simply pursuing an agenda that accomplishes that in their eyes.
I don't have any evidence that most people aren't evil, but in my day to day interactions I have yet to meet someone who I believe is sincerely evil. I'm sure they're out there, I just have faith that there's a lot more of the rest of us.
Should you fault someone for being the change they want to see in the world? (For the record I'm opposed to Free Basics)
Perhaps we should focus more on judging the outcomes of people's actions instead of their intent.
I believe most people are incapable of recognizing well-intentioned but bad actions when they agree with the intentions. Even when you don't agree with the intentions, it's can still be hard to spot without the benefit of hindsight.
Should you fault someone for being the change they want to see in the world?
"Fault" is quite a slippery word to use in this context. As it means both a failing of character and responsibility for wrongdoing.
Obviously with the second definition it's easy to fault someone when you see their actions as wrongdoing.
With the first it's mixed, and I suspect that's the one you mean. Someone who is "being the change they want to see in the world" is seen as virtuous. But when that virtuous person is also too headstrong to see, acknowledge, and correct the negatives of their plans when they encounter well-articulated resistance? Yes, I would very much fault that person.
If he was sincere, he would have been truthful rather than using every kind of fallacy from https://signposts02.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/logical-fall....
The only way we'd have universal untiered internet is if there was some sort of government fee / tax that you just had to pay to get internet and that was your only option.
Everyone has vastly different (tiered) internet experiences, for example the internet on my phone is faster than the internet on my desktop when uploading.
On my phone I pay for additional data use on my desktop I don't.
Every decision must be evaluated based on its long term trajectory. For example, giving a benevolent government unchecked powers will actually produce short term efficiency gains. But given infinite time, and the fact that it only takes one Hitler to fuck things up completely, it reasons that giving a government unchecked powers will inevitably lead to that scenario.
In Zuckerberg's case, regardless of his motivations, his plan will most likely have short term benefits. It's unfortunate because that's a great selling point. Unfortunately the net neutrality precedent it sets for the long term is bad, and just like Nazi America with a government with unchecked powers, letting Facebook do this is equivalent to giving them a monopoly because such an action will inevitably converge in abuse at some point in the future by integrating over the individual benevolent actions over an infinite amount of time.
> However, I believe he is also sincere in thinking that Facebook is the best and perhaps only platform by which this is possible. In this he is sincerely mistaken.
Why not just give people free bundles of data and let them gravitate towards Facebook how we do in ie: North America?
However, I believe he is also sincere in thinking that Facebook is the best and perhaps only platform by which this is possible. In this he is sincerely mistaken.
I feel sure he doesn't think of it as a land grab, even privately. But he is looking from the inside out. If he wants to be seen as the Great Connector, he needs to be pouring money into local infrastructure, subsidizing open source routing software, lobbying worldwide against entrenched bureaucracy and corporate obstructionism. They're doing some of that, sure, but Free Basics is heavy handed and no one trusts Facebook to begin with - it's not strange to think of it as a sort of modern digital imperialist.