Russia has a similar government-backed Internet services ecosystem going on, although they dropped the ball on blogging and wound up having to do a complex operation to buy Livejournal (where all the Russians were) and move the servers to Russian territory.

I think different companies, although they may be monopolies in their own right, spread out over multiple countries is still preferable to a global monopoly. Not just because of data collection, also regarding keeping tech know-how locally for example.

I can't imagine anyone thinks such a situation is in the best interest of the user.

1) It's a voluntary transaction and is not compulsory

2) They precisely buy because it would be harder to build it from scratch. Which refutes your claim that Google or FB can't be competed against.

edit: formatting

In any voluntary transaction, both parties gain out of it. People who are not parties to that transaction have no business in it.

> 1) Yes, it's voluntary, but the interests of the consumers aren't necessarily taken into account. Only the shareholders of the companies being bought stand to gain from the transactions

Yes of course, because they are trading their private property. When you buy vegetables from the supermarket, can someone complain that you're not taking into consideration other people's interests, namely there's less food for everyone else. And also that only you and the supermarket stand to gain out of the transaction. This is an reductio ad absurdum of your statement

> 2) Google/Fb gives these companies an offer at a moment when it still makes sense to buy them (i.e. when they can both win from the acquisition). If the company being bought decides to decline, Google or FB or whatever monolith has ways of destroying them: - By buying their competitor instead of them, and heavily investing in them - By just building the feature themselves, and potentially fighting a very expensive legal battle

Okay, I see your logical problem, you want good to be done in one instance, but you IMHO fail to see the consequences if you logically apply that concept to its conclusion.

Again, voluntary transaction. If the startup refuses, it's voluntary. If FB or Google goes and invests elsewhere it's their money, their business. Who are we to tell them what to do with their money. Would you be okay if they told what to do with money you've earned? All things you've mentioned are coercive i.e. they are all based on things people have agreed on in written documents. Concretely, if they (Google/FB) buy a competitor, it's their money, their business. If they build the feature themselves, their money, they don't owe this startup their money, they refused when offered anyway. If they fight a legal battle, it's still legitimate because both parties (Google/FB and startup) have all agreed to work with local laws (US or otherwise).

For example, give us at least one example of a service that would directly cause Facebook to think twice before making it's app constantly harass me to update my page, minimising the videos I am trying to close, and automatically sending me push notifications for someone starting a live video?

Everybody is not there, even on Facebook, there is no such social network yet.

> and which makes Facebook fear the loss of it's users.

Whatsapp, Instagram and Snapchat. Facebook has paid premium prices for the former two and gave a pretty high offer for snapchat. They wouldn't do that if they're concerned ( of course, neither you nor I can confirm their emotional state, but we can derive useful conclusions from their actions)

> For example, give us at least one example of a service that would directly cause Facebook to think twice before making it's app constantly harass me to update my page, minimising the videos I am trying to close, and automatically sending me push notifications for someone starting a live video?

Have you stopped using facebook? Then why should they care? They will care IMO, but the point is by continuing to use facebook, you've shown that you weigh the benefits of facebook to be more than the costs/annoyances. So, you're happy enough as far as they're concerned, they might try and make you happier but that's left to them :)

Edit: Whoops! I hit submit before completing my last sentence

More importantly, the functionality of Facebook can be replicated by anyone with more-then a few years of experience in software.

So you're saying that Facebook does have proper competition? No, they don't. They were lucky enough to be at the exact place at the exact time to build the sturdy population of users. And now most of the users are paying for their luck.

Why not? Being the first one in and the best at what you do is still competition. Most industries don't get disrupted by a competitor until there is truly some valuable innovation that happened. (ie look at Yahoo and MySpace)

Whenever the government starts to interfere it sounds really good on paper, but it typically is not in the best interest of the user. Existing corporations often use laws to then further eliminate incoming competition.

To use your driving example it would be like saying that to use a car everyone has to drive on the same side of the road or accept identical pollution control standards. That's obviously not the case. Cars are adapted--sometimes quite substantially--to local jurisdictions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariffs_in_United_States_histo...

You could debate how far the US could go with it before there are serious repercussions. However, several of the big auto-making countries go a great distance out of their way to shield their own domestic auto industries from foreign competition at home, including Germany and Japan. The US should behave exactly as they do and for exactly the same reasons.

What has the US gained by allowing foreign auto competitors such equal footing? Japan and Germany are widely regarded as having the two best auto industries overall, it has clearly has worked out just fine for them (insert the replies about correlation/causation). Why is the US held to a very different standard than China, Germany and Japan (3 of the 4 largest economies) when it comes to trade? That should and will end by necessity, whether it's a Trump or a Bernie Sanders that does it. It's a cultural wave that can't be stopped.

The US should use every lever at its disposal to compete, including strategically manipulating the global reserve currency (eg it's crazy that the US isn't running a $2 trillion, ten year, infrastructure QE program; the USD as the global reserve currency is unlikely to last more than a few more decades, we should leverage it while we have it to increase US competitiveness).

The fact that the Chinese sanctioned companies become monopolies themselves is even more proof that it's about nationalism than protection from monopolies.

Well if I was Chinese I guess I'd hope my government was making some effort to protect the national interest at least.

Of course they are developing their own monopolies and have some pretty terrifying social control programs in the works. That can be criticised in its own right and hopefully it will be. But to try and make the case that FB is a benevolent saviour of the Chinese citizenry from their evil government is nonsense and whataboutery. If you must believe in the US as some kind of global beacon of free speech and democracy, then at least don't think that just being the lesser of two evils is a really great way to promote this.

The hard problem is that any proprietary social platform has to have a mass of people using it to be particularly useful, and any social platform that big is collecting data that makes it a huge security risk and economic factor at the national level. The only solutions I can think of are to have social networks under national control or to promote interoperability between smaller networks and partition data collection to an acceptable level for national security purposes.

> and also acting as the world's biggest innovation VC

Wew.

> Other countries have been asleep at the wheel

Calm down with the CN propaganda.

Perhaps this is out of context, but I wonder if Trump is a symptom of this protectionism or if they're unrelated

I was going to add ".. unless you're American", but I'm not even sure if such a concentration of power would be a net neutral (or good) in the long run, for any citizen, US or elsewhere.

<rant> I personally blame this as a big part of why our country's government is in its current state. With unrestricted free access to Facebook, it was exceedingly easy to spread memes/fake news about how "bad-ass and cool" Duterte is and how hilariously incompetent the opposition is. And it's still going on today. It is now used as a propaganda machine, up to the point where one particular Facebook page owner spreading memes/fake news now holds an official position in the government, thanks to their 'services'. </rant>

Now Google, with its Indian origin CEO is trying his hand by providing free wifi at Indian Railway stations.

Everyone now wants a chunk of a growing economy like India to convert its people to "products".

Indian authorities should be smart enough to differentiate between the good & bad things that giants like Facebook & Google can do to the country, its economy and nowadays even its stability.

Smaller companies do scary things too. Consider Equifax, the zillion adtech companies out there injecting Javascript everywhere, and all the no-name Android vendors that never put out security updates. At least some of the big names invest in improving security and do some policing of the smaller ones.

The Internet's feudal structure comes from specialization due to outsourcing security, often from smaller to larger companies. Cloudflare is largely in the business of providing protection to smaller companies. Or take the whole cloud thing; this makes security much easier than running your own data center.

Even at the individual level, we don't want to run our own spam filters and moderate our own comments. We want a trusted source of security updates. Someone needs to keep the bad guys out so we give others the power to do it for us.

What does this mean? How you envision this happening?

Of course, this is a false distinction. The digital and the physical world are actually one and the same, viewed through different lenses. But eventually the network and services and content and algorithms of the digital realm will become central. Perhaps this is how it happens:

Facebook, Google, Amazon are proto-states. They are centers of power which dispense favors upon their "citizens" (users) in exchange for power over the users (data). At present they're primarily constrained by an environment of competition fostered by government. But over time they assume more and more functions of government. You can already "vote" in these corporations (as shareholders).

Suppose the government that currently constrains the corporations weakens, fractures. The U.S. splits up, for example. Then the boundary-crossing multinational corporations become the unified power centers. Now they are constrained only by each other. A great power struggle occurs in which the digital powers strive for dominance. There is a physical element---cutting fiber connections, etc.---but mostly it's about algorithms. Eventually the virtual space is partitioned into states just as the physical world.

In time, the "users" in each virtual state become discontented. They revolt and demand greater say in their governance. They live in virtual realities governed by the virtual states. Thus they have a great incentive to gain power over the governments. Thus democracy arises.

Anyway, this is all really far-out, weird thinking, and maybe it doesn't hold up. But something like this seems roughly plausible.

They're still disgusting moves. India prohibited Internet.org, but Facebook is actively pushing it in many other countries (Nigeria, Indonesia, South Africa, Bolivia, Bangladesh, Kenya, Guatemala, etc.).

As someone who was too poor to afford internet for years, I would have adored such a deal. It would have greatly improved my standard of living, and to me I feel like the objections come from people with no understanding of what poverty is like. It really feels like looking a gift horse in the mouth; I feel like the benefits of free internet for the poor far outweigh the self righteousness.

I'd really like to know why it's better for me to have no internet at all than some but not all?

Because under the pretext of giving you internet, Facebook is creating shadow profiles about me.

Now I would like to know why it is more important for you to get stuff for free than my privacy?

All you need to do, of course, is get Facebook to promise me that it won't create these shadow profiles about non-users. At that moment, you should (hopefully) have a little bit of an "aha!".

If that free internet were actually provided by the government, and was funded by taxation, "we the people" (however comical that notion is these days), actually have the legislative and ultimately the executive power to stop our government from doing shady things with that internet. What is your recourse if the same thing is decided behind closed doors inside a corporation? I will answer that question for you based on how these things usually turn out: whatever the corporation eventually agrees to will turn out to be better for them, because it will be worse for their competitors. Think: audit of all data collected, having onerous laws around financial reporting, having to agree with a million different compliance issues etc. At the end of it all, someone will look back on it and wring their hands: "If only the people had been a little wiser and stopped the giant corporation from having their way, things could have been so much better".

Think, for a moment, about the farcical fines these megaliths are facing. If you were an executive at any of these companies, would you actually lose sleep over them? If the fines are not acting as a deterrent, why even bother with the fine? Again, where is your recourse?

I am all for public shaming of FB employees, because if they were to stop counting their bank balance and just look themselves in the mirror for a little bit, they know they have completely earned this shaming.

They can browse Accuweather, BBC News, Bing, Wikipedia and other localised websites all day long if they please. For free.

For example, lets suppose that you visit your favourite digital newspaper. After reading an article or a howto you see a "like this article?/was this howto useful?/Send us your feedback" button. It seems (I can't confirm it so I could be wrong, just hear it on the TV news yesterday), that facebook was saving silently all this info about preferences from lots of people that aren't neither facebook users nor visiting facebook forums and webs

If we thing about it, wouldn't be much different than to put a creepy guy near the door of a supermarket recording all that you buy to sell all this info later.

Here is a list of possible ways Facebook can triangulate information about people who are not active on Facebook even without controlling access to the internet:

1. User telemetry based on your browser when you visit any page which has a Like button

2. If you have ever used WhatsApp and deleted it, seeing who has your phone number on their contacts list

3. If you have ever used WhatsApp and deleted it, seeing who has your phone number on their WhatsApp app

4. Being tagged in a photo (that your friend captured) based on a Facebook account which you don't even actively use

5. Seeing where they tagged you if that info is easy to infer from the image's metadata

6. Seeing where they tagged you based on the check in location

7. Seeing where they tagged you, based on the comment they might leave on the photo

8. Seeing who has your email address on their contacts list and associated a name to it

9. Inferring your name from someone's contacts and matching it to the phone number so that

10. They can check if a second person has the same phone number or same email address under the same name or a small variant.

11. Learning about life events which concern you based on other people's WhatsApp conversations about you since they usually mention you by name

12. Text mining of WhatsApp conversations for a list of names which they don't yet have in their database and possibly inferring the relationship type

Now they basically have a "shadow profile" of a (person's name + phone number) even if that person has never gone near Facebook their entire lives. If there are additional details about you in someone else's contacts, imagine how much easier you just made it for Facebook.

12. If you agree that the shadow profile is fairly easy to create once the apps controlled by FB (FB, Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram) reach a sufficient critical mass, you probably understand that they will collect every piece of information they can and associate it with the right shadow profile.

My guess is, I don't cover a fraction of the techniques they use already (simply because at a certain scale, I bet they identified even bigger patterns that we cannot even see), and the list is already too uncomfortable for someone who doesn't want to have anything to do with Facebook. As a programmer, you probably know that most of these are trivial to implement. Your problem will be "too much noise", definitely not "too little signal". No worries. An eager horde of people are everyday helping Facebook to cut down the noise and increase the signal to noise ratio of their shadow profiles.

Now, imagine what happens when Facebook becomes the primary means to access the internet for an entire region.

I also grew with no internet for entirety of my childhood, but i never wished for free internet that could let me browse some social networking site.

1) Govt will have to raise more taxes (this is a curb on freedom). Why should someone else pay for your services?

2) Bigger Govt will have political motives which will murk up the services it provides. Said another way, FB loses business if consumers don't like it, but a govt goes on because it's funded by tax dollars not customer revenue

Why would you not fund another person's internet from your salary? Are profits that much different from salaries?

    > I don't understand people's objections

* Massive and lingering anti-colonial sentiment

* Disregard for those lower down on the social totem pole

Dressed up in fancy sounding intellectual privacy concerns.

It's why we should criticize the actions of any power (whether the Us, China, the EU, Russia) to control citizens and eliminate smaller cultures. Maybe melodramatic but it's exciting. The growth of Chinese networks is interesting, wonder how they would develop under a democratic government? Further innovation or do they only exist because of that environment as you suggest?

While friends and coworkers who work(ed) at facebook have had a much better time, with far more perks, interesting projects work not thrown away and a much better work life balance.

I think there are already more than two dozen smaller niche social networks.

Sources for McDonlads replacing all other restaurants. Maybe you haven't traveled as much but for me I always check out local McDonalds, hardly actually eating there. One of the reason they have been successful is adopting local tastes. Costa Rica has Gallo Pinto in addition to fries as options. Serbia has this crazy Crispy meat thing.

With McDonalds I know what the product is and I pay for it. With Facebook it's a little less clear what they are doing. One certainty with FB, we are the product.

With FB they are a little nefarious, especially the Free Basics thing. Google is doing similar things with Google Fiber and the defunct ballon idea.

If people cared about privacy that much, they should use some other network. People weigh the trade-offs of benefits vs costs and still choose to use FB and Google.

A robotic bunch of Indians influenced by the Net Neutrality hoopla developed and targeted at Monopoly Telecom in the US blindly applied these arguments to the Indian context.

The result - rural India is and will remain unconnected. Telcos have no great new ideas on how to connect rural india (and therefore no great avenues to grow) so they are starting to merge. Soon we will have 1-2 giant Telcos monopolies. The clueless herd driven by social media reinforcement and validation strikes again.

Or the mathematics won't pan out, and the company dies. And the government will probably step in to fill the breach. And it will probably do an awful job (remember the mathematics never panned out?)

Both of these are good outcomes. Compare this to handing over the control of such vital infrastructure to a megacorp which has a consistent track record of violating the trust of everyone - the users (random privacy rule changes), the advertisers (fake video views), those they acquire (e.g. the comedy show called WhatsApp ads), the jurisdictions they operate in (arbitrary censorship of content to make sure they kowtow to the public flavor du jour) and last but not least the legal system (claiming that they cannot/will not infer a WhatsApp user profile based on FB user profile knowing the pitifully tiny effect of the punitive damages).

With such a track record, it is a surprise that they even have the temerity to still approach governments around the world to propose FreeBasics.

Why do you get a say on what their preferences are?

I think the socialist vs democracy revolution which happened last century is happening with libertarian vs democratic ideas now. You will not see it until it hits it's peak but it's well underway.

It's like leaving an email in your drafts folder expecting google to read it. Or typing something into Google Search box and expecting that to be legal communication.

More info: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDHDM7PfyYs

The above video makes good points even though it's been posted by college humor (not particularly meant to get your legal advice from)

I'll leave it to you to figure out how/why. :)

2) Besides, govt bureaucrats don't have the ability now (IMHO) to think rationally and get to the best decision

3) Govt has no business to get in the way of voluntary transactions between two adults